Ep. 36: Dr. Ronald Siegel - Who’s In Charge–You or Your Mind?

Producer: Welcome back to Full PreFrontal, where we are exposing the mysteries of executive functions. I am here again with our host, Sucheta Kamath. Good morning, Sucheta. Always good to be with you. Looking forward to today’s conversation. In a coming interview with Dr. Ron Siegel, that will be great. Before we begin, you’re going to talk to us about a man, his son, and a donkey, and what any of that has to do with mindfulness.

Sucheta: Yes, Todd, that’s correct. Let me ask you this question. Do you think we actually evolve to be happy or we simply evolve to survive and outlive the most treacherous circumstances or treacherous environment that we were living in? What I want to talk about today is the mind and the brain connection. The most painful experiences are much more memorable to us than the pleasurable ones. You can understand that, right? So let me tell you a story that I grew up listening to. This is one of the Aesop’s Fables. Long time ago, there was a man who took his son and his donkey to the market. After a little while, he passed some villagers and he heard them say, “You fools. Why are you not riding the donkey? What do you think the donkey is for?” After listening to those words, of course the man said okay and he put the boy in the donkey and they continued to go towards the market.

After a little while, again they passed some more villagers and one whispered and said, “What an entitled young man. Can you imagine, he’s letting his father walk in this terrible heat and he is so carefully riding this donkey?” So when the man heard this, he of course got the boy off the donkey and he got himself got on the donkey. Then he continued with the journey, the he passed a couple of women. One of the women just come out and said to the man, “Shame on you, old man! Can’t you see that a little boy is suffering and you’re walking merrily on this donkey?”

So after that, the man changed his mind again and he pulled his son and they both began to ride the donkey. By now they entered the town where the market was and the man heard many people whisper or snicker as he was passing by. One of them come out and said, “Hey, aren’t you ashamed of yourself? How cruel! You both are weighing this donkey down.”

By then, the man was very close to the market but he still wasn’t there and he got off the donkey. He pulled in his boy down and he began to think and think and think and said, “What should I do?” Of course, he had an idea. Nearby, there was a pole so he took the pole. He tied the donkey front feet, back feet to the pole and then he put the pole on his shoulder and then asked his son to do the same and they began to carry the donkey across this bridge. Now, as they were crossing the bridge, the donkey began to lose his mind. He began to kick and struggle and then the donkey fell into the water and all the people of the village laughed.

So the story here is talking about this man who constantly was in a state of fear about what people were saying and he changed his mind every time he heard a new way people were judging him and telling him what to do. This story clearly talks about the man and his struggle to please others but more importantly his tireless effort to avoid the pain that he feels when others criticize him or critique him. Neuroscientists believe that over millions of years, our brains have evolved to escape the pain and hunt for the pleasure. The fleeting nature of the pleasure, however, just contrasted with the ever so present dull ache or pain of suffering that comes from the memory of past events or rejection or hurt that comes from people talking poorly of you get stuck to our brain and makes the emotional regulation impossible.

So the question is, what is the best way to unstick this pain that we so closely hang on to? So let’s find out from my guest today, Ronald Siegel. He is an assistant professor of psychology part-time at Harvard Medical School, where he has taught over last 30 years. He is a long-time student of mindfulness medication and serves on the board of directors and faculty of the Institute of Meditation and Psychotherapy. He teaches internationally about the application of mindfulness practice in psychotherapy and other fields and maintains a private clinical practice in Lincoln, Massachusetts. Dr. Siegel is also a co-author of Self-treatment Guide Back Sense: A Revolutionary Approach to Halting the Cycle of Back Pain, which integrates Western and Eastern approaches to treating chronic back pain. He is a co-editor of critically acclaimed Text Mindfulness in Psychotherapy. He is a co-author of Professional Guide Fitting Together Essential Skills for Mindfulness-Based Psychotherapy, and he is a professor for the Science of Mindfulness: A Research-based Path to wellbeing produced by a Great Courses. I highly recommend that. We will have links to all of Dr. Siegel’s work and I highly recommend to subscribe to this great course which I got a lot out of. So with that, i will just say one more thing, Todd. there is a book called the Buddhist Brain, in which the author Rick Henson says that our brain has evolved to be a velcro for bad experiences and teflon for good. What it means is the bad experiences glue to the brain without any effort but the good experiences just lied ever so slightly off the teflon surface and we need to find some tools to find out how to tackle that. So that’s what we’re going to do today.

Producer: I look forward to that, Sucheta. I had never heard of that Aesop fable before. It’s fascinating, what my life changed dramatically when i began to not worry what the public thought of me and my actions. It took a long time to get there but I’ve only got there and it changed everything for me. Boy. that velcro and the teflon certainly is apropos to what’s happening in our society today. It’s going to be a great conversation, very much looking forward to it so let’s get right to it. Here is Sucheta’s conversation with Dr. Ron Siegel.

Sucheta: I am so happy to have you, Dr. Siegel. Welcome to the podcast.

Siegel: Thanks for inviting me.

Sucheta: Let me start with my perspective on this topic. My clinical experience in working with people who are struggling to live at their personal best is the inability to manage. May that be attention, intention, responsibilities, goals, thoughts, behaviors, or even relationships. So when I think about the key ingredient in executive function proficiency, I often link it directly to self-regulation. Can you talk about the key component of self-regulation, which is emotional self-regulation? And how do you see it help unlock the human success?

Siegel: Well, emotional self-regulation is a very interesting topic if we step back and think, why do humans have difficulty with this? The reason we have difficulties with this is because we evolved with several different motivational systems, as well as capacities to deal with challenges, all of which don’t necessarily play well with one another. For example, we inherited from even reptiles and fish and certainly the other mammals this fight or flight response, this response that we have when we experience ourselves to be in some form of danger, right? We either react to the danger by fighting against some threat or running away or sometimes a third thing which is to freeze. Now, this capacity, while it has saved so many of our ancestors from so many difficulties over the years, clearly has also the capacity to get in the way of us stopping, thinking clearly, evaluating options, and making rational decisions. In fact, with kids for example, I worked for many years in a clinical chief psychologist and we’ve had a lot of kids who had a lot of emotional disregulation problems. Very often, the question that would arrive is, Johnny would do something completely hairbrained. He’d run away from school. He would assault another kid or something. And then when the parents would be sitting down talking to Johnny, they’d say, “What were you thinking?” And the answer was he wasn’t thinking at all. Johnny was simply reacting out of the parts of his brain that had evolved to deal with feeling under threat in some way or another.

So when we’re talking about emotional self-regulation, we are largely talking about the ability to be able to take a breath when some kind of emotion or impulse arises in the heart and in the mind rather than  simply acting on it impulsively. Now, we have difficulty at levels that are much more nuanced than the simple fight, freeze, and flight response because we have all sorts of emotional needs, right? Humans evolve to have the need to feel accepted by others, right? Because if you were alone in the African Savanna, that was a death sentence. So we have a very strong need to feel like we’re included and we’re accepted. Humans also evolved a very strong need to feel like we’re comparing well to others. Because historically, and you can see this across mammalian species. In fact you can even see it in some species of crickets. There is social ranking that happens. Who’s on top? Who’s on bottom? To be on top meant to have a much better chance of propagating your DNA because it turns out that in mammalian species, both the dominant males and the females that consort with the dominant males have a much better shot at propagating their DNA and having their kids taken care of and they have more access to resource than this kind of [00:10:41].

This, in humans, translates to our ever present concern with self-esteem and social comparison and feeling respected or not. Of course whenever we feel like we’re injured in this way, where we feel like we’ve been put down or disrespected in some way, that raises up all sorts of emotions that very often people act on in ways, again, where it’s the what were you thinking question. Well, they weren’t really thinking. People were simply responding to this very powerful hardwired emotional drive to try to feel good about one’s self or to feel like I’m on top or I’m winning.

So we have all of this intense impulses that arise up in the heart, in the mind, in our nervous system. Humans also have the capacity to reflect on these and so it’s a competition between our capacity to reflect on these and these very powerful instinctual systems and often our capacity to reflect loses out.

Sucheta: I love the way you have laid this down because I think this really, really gives a wonderful perspective particularly parents of young children as well as those adults who tend to be a lot more impulsive than most, this cool system and the hot system. It’s wonderful to logically think that yes, I need to take my time. I need to really not blurt out. But when you are blurting out, that’s because at that time, your emotions are hijacked by these primitive primal set of pre-wired emotions, so to speak. I love that framework.

So let’s get into it. You are the expert in mindfulness. What is mindfulness and how did this become a part of everyday language in the Western world and it is kind of new when even the neuroscience of efficacy and effectiveness of mindfulness practice has crept into the science which is so amazing to me and about time. But can you give us a little bit of what that is?

Siegel: Sure. So mindfulness is a attitude towards experience. In other words, it’s a way in which we can train the heart and the mind to relate to whatever arises in our awareness. It’s an attitude of being aware of what’s happening in the moment nonjudgmentally and being able to accept what’s happening in the moment. We might call it awareness of present experience with acceptance. It turns out that virtually all of the world’s cultures have evolved some form of mindfulness practice. Some way in which they have some kind of training in order to help people to be able to have this present centered awareness. We might think, well why did that have to evolve? Cultures have evolved this because of the problem that I was just referring to previously which is that throughout the ages, people have noticed that there is this tendency to react based on these very basic human motivational systems that doesn’t always work out well and very often gets us into trouble.

Now, there’s an interesting relationship here between mindfulness and thinking because our capacity for thinking actually is essential to emotion regulation, to be able to consider is this a good idea or is this not a good idea. But as humans, we can also get caught in our thoughts in which we start to believe in our thoughts in a way which is counterproductive. We see this most clearly for example when we’re stuck in a set thoughts that are very prejudiced or bigoted, for example.

People can be thinking a lot and thinking, Oh, that other group, they are horrible. They’re inferior to us. We need to control and dominate them. That kind of thing. That’s an example of being very caught in thought or thinking, I got to get her or him to love me, when somebody’s involved in some romantic challenge. That’s the most important thing and I can’t live, I can’t breathe unless I can get them to love me. So we can get very caught in out thoughts, including a lot in our egotistical thoughts about self-esteem, about needing stuff, about wanting to win, about wanting to be the best, about wanting to have things that others don’t have. Virtually, all the world’s cultures have noticed that we go overboard in this and it causes a great deal of suffering.

So they’ve evolved mechanisms to help us to step out of the thought stream and to just come back to feeling what’s happening in the present moment. This becomes very important because if we talk about the sources of emotional disregulation, very often when somebody does something foolish because they’re overwhelmed by an emotion or an impulse, there’s some feelings that they feel they can’t tolerate. I can’t bear this feeling of humiliation that’s why I’m assaulting you in the playground incident.

In fact, I came across this study recently. It was done in Britain and the question was, “What exactly is going on interpersonally immediately before kids start hitting each other on the playground in school?” It turned out that the most common conflict was some argument over who was right. We can see this if you’re involved in couples relationships, business partnerships. The argument over who was right, that’s what happens before people come to blows. But if we step back and reflect them. We think this is purely symbolic. It’s about who’s better, who’s smarter. It’s this kind of symbolic stuff that gets us so activated.

So mindfulness practice has really evolved to help us to be able to bear the feeling of disappointment perhaps or bear the feeling of hungering for something and not having it or bear the feeling of wishing that something would be different and not feel compelled to act on it. The practices are actually quite simple. What they all involve is finding some way to step out of our normal stream of thought and simply come back into what’s happening in the body here and now. Classic mindfulness practices will involve something like following the sensations of the breath and every time that the mind wanders from the sensation of the breath bringing it back to that sensation.

You think, well, what’s trained in that? I mean, that seems like a pretty silly thing to do. Well, several important things are trained in that very simple exercise. For one thing, we start to actually feel in a moment-to-moment way what’ happening on a sensory level in the body. So we notice when there is discomfort arising, for example, when there’s sensations of heat or cold or the breath is quicker or the breath is slower or I feel the sensations of contact with the chair on the floor. We tune in to the sensory level and that becomes particularly useful and important in terms of emotion regulation because all emotions actually exist first and foremost as bodily sensations.

Sucheta: Such a powerful observation, such a wonderful comment. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?

Siegel: Sure. Well, let me ask you or our listeners just this very moment to say, for example, generate a little bit of sadness. Most of us can do that, think or something sad or bring up an image. And then close your eyes for a moment and notice where in the body do you actually feel the sadness? Would you like to share? Where do you feel it? Where do you notice it in your body?

Sucheta: I feel in my chest, for me.

Siegel: In your chest?

Sucheta: Yes.

Siegel: It’s very, very common and sometimes people say their neck, sometimes their eyes, sometimes their belly. I usually feel it in my chest as well. The critical thing isn’t exactly where we feel it but to notice that it’s actually a bodily sensation, isn’t it?

Sucheta: It’s so powerful, yes.

Siegel: Or we could do this with fear, let’s say, to generate a moment’s fear or anxiety. And this also is pretty easy for most of us to do, think of something that makes us nervous or worries us and then close your eyes and notice where in the body is that experienced? And we notice that that too is a bodily experience, sometimes that chest, sometimes people say the back of the neck. We can do it with anger. Think of something that you find to be annoying. Nowadays, if you’re listening to this in the United States, just think of the other political party whoever that is or you. You had to get a little anger going, right? Where do you feel that? There again, sometimes it’s the shoulder, sometimes it’s the chest, sometimes the belly.

Sucheta: Or your temple.

Siegel: I’m sorry?

Sucheta: No, your forehead and your —

Siegel: Or your forehead sometimes. Right. Exactly. So the important point here is that all of these are somatic experiences, right? I won’t ask you about lust. We all know where we feel that. But all of these powerful emotions are somatic experiences. If what we’re doing in mindfulness practice is attuning to our somatic experiences by spending more time just being with the breath or being with other bodily sensations and noticing and noticing what’s happening in the body moment by moment, we get better at reading our emotions.

And the other thing we do in mindfulness practice which is very important is when discomfort arises, let’s say you’re sitting for a while, you’re following your breath and you get a groin itch. Instead of immediately as we normally would scratching the itch or changing our posture to resolve the ache, what we do is we simply stay with the experience. We simply bring our attention to the discomfort and notice how the discomfort evolves over time. It gets more intense, less intense. It shifts its focus. When we do that and we start to notice that hey, we can actually simply ride out and tolerate and feel discomfort without having to act on it to get rid of it. Well, that skill is going to become enormously important for emotion regulation because what’s going to happen then is then for the rest our lives when a wave of sadness comes up or a wave of fear comes up or wave of anger comes, rather than doing something to fix it which we so often feel compelled to do, we have another option. We can simply be with it. We can simply feel it, write it out and notice or change it. That gives us enormous capacity for emotion regulation.

It’s very interesting to realize that virtually all the world’s cultures have hit on some variation of this. Sometimes they do prayer practices, sometimes it’s the rituals the hunters would do when they’re sitting still to wait for the animal. Sometimes you see as you see in yoga traditions and a lot of Buddhist meditation traditions where they’re doing formal meditation. But virtually every culture has hit on our need for this and has evolved someway to practice it.

Sucheta: So wonderful. I think you answered several of my next follow-up questions, questions that I was about to ask. One thing that struck out in all this conversation to me, I had a guest, Carol Tavris, who has written about Cognitive Dissonance and she had mentioned this idea when we discovered this contradiction between our own belief about ourselves and something we have done that completely violates our own sense of self, then it creates a deep discomfort. One of the solutions she said, we need to really learn to sit with the hot potato. The minute somebody puts a hot potato, the temptation is just toss it. Also talking about this, sit with it and really bear the pain. So it’s an endurance exercise if you look at it and it’s also developing that self-distancing but really concretizing. I love that idea of really locating the pain. It’s not somewhere out in the universe or deep inside your psyche. It’s literally in your forehead or in your wrist, your chest.

People often nowadays talk a lot about being on autopilot. All the thing that they tend to do is during this autopilot mode, when they are not thinking clearly about their thinking. Is there a distinction between our thoughts about self which Damasio talks in consciousness about your autobiographical memory gets activated the moment you open your eyes and all the knowledge you have about you is brought onboard. So do not think about self in a selfish way but more enlightened self-interest way. You’re kind of talking about shifting that awareness. Is that something doable for all of us or is that something really you’re talking about? How do we become less selfish while we are pursuing goals that matter to us? How do we become less self-indulgent when we are really trying to make a point to show I know the answer to it? How do you recommend we think about this mindfulness concept when we are with people?

Siegel: Very interestingly, one of the benefits of mindfulness practices is we get to see very clearly how the mind create suffering for itself. For so many people, particularly if you’re living in a first-world environment, where there really is enough to eat, there is probably perhaps even some access to medical care. We have shelter and yet we are struggling. We’re feeling dissatisfied. You tell we’re having difficulty. Much of this is because actually our basic needs are taken care of but the mind is creating suffering for itself in some way.

One of the things we start to see when we start to watch the mind more carefully in mindfulness practices is that very often, the way in which where creating suffering for yourselves is feeling that we need to have what we want when we want it.

Sucheta: Yes.

Siegel: This is most clearly evident in addictions of all sorts. If we look at addictions to substances, well what’s that about? Well, some state of mind or body that is uncomfortable, we want to change it into another. If we take the substance, it makes that shift and doing that from time to time, occasionally, having glass of wine. No harm done. But if you do that compulsively, you get yourself into all sorts of difficulty because what happens is that the effects of escaping, if you will, by using the substance bring in all sorts of negative consequences in our lives. But this happens and other things too. It happens in going to the fridge for the piece of chocolate cake in the moment when we’re feeling a little bored or a little bit uncomfortable in some way.

There’s so many of our activities that we do take the form of addictions this way. It’s like having some immediate need addressed here and now but where it doesn’t have a great long term consequence. The kid who gets from his math homework after one problem is addicted, if you will, to the relief from the frustration of the math problem being hard. So there’s so many things that operate this way.

So what we start to learn is, hey, so often when I do what I feel like right now because it’s what I want in this moment, it doesn’t necessarily have good long term consequences for us. The classic Stanford experiment, I think it’s Walter Michelle offered 4 year olds marshmallows and they said, “I’m going to go out of the room for moment and here’s this marshmallow. If you eat it now, that’s your marshmallow ration for the day. But if you can wait, I’ll give you two marshmallows.” The capacity to bear the feeling of wanting a marshmallow and not eating it right away correlated to so many form of success in life because it was about not just immediately gratifying a certain desire.

So we start to notice in mindfulness practice that when we feel compelled to act on desires, it brings a lot of suffering for ourselves and for others. Luckily, mindfulness practice has helped us to have that capacity to bear and to be with discomfort which is the central capacity for not being self-centered. Because think about people who are very self-centered in the world or think about ourselves when we’re acting in a very self-centered way. It’s almost always about “I want what I want for me now.”

When we think of people who are wise and not self-centered, they are always thinking, okay, so what’s the consequence of this for me and for others in the short run and the long run? It’s having that greater perspective which is central to more wise action in the world. Mindfulness practice interestingly, if you read about them in, for example, the Buddhist traditions and you don’t have to be Buddhist to do this. This exists in all the world’s cultures. But there, they say, well, the whole point of the practices is to cultivate wisdom and compassion. The whole point is to have this ability to not be immediately self-focused on my needs and what’s best for me but to see the big picture and to have feelings of compassion both for our own suffering and for the suffering of others. So this kind of maturity, if you will, is very much the goal of the practices. We now have data that shows it’s actually effective with practices.

Sucheta: Amazing. I could talk to you for hours and I cannot believe we’re already at the end of this segment but I’m highly encouraging all our listeners to tune in to the next one where we’ll be talking about actual therapeutic process. I wanted to close with this thought that came to my mind as you were speaking, that I really appreciate the importance and value of mindfulness practice because to me it helps in two ways. One is it it connects how to heighten that awareness and recognize its relationship to the self and self-identifying information and create that separate or distance as you were talking about. And secondly is how it helps you build a new perspective which is, again, cognitive flexibility and perspective taking. So really, in at least Hindu tradition as well, we have the concept of relative truth. This idea of pain and pleasure and success and failure which are life is full of sorrow sprinkled with joy or life is full of joy sprinkled with sorrow. It’s up to you. But what would you say in conclusion that if people think about mindfulness, what’s your one closing takeaway for people that you would love for them to think about?

Siegel: Well, that it is basically this is a way to train the heart and the mind to help us to live in a way which is saner,  more mature, and in long run far more gratifying and far more satisfying. We need it because we didn’t exactly evolve to be happy or mature. The human brain doesn’t necessarily lead us in the best of directions. All one needs to do is look at world history and politics and the like to realize that, yeah, we need work and this is one way to work on ourselves.

Sucheta: Thank you so much for your time and your wisdom. I’m very, very grateful for having this conversation today and I can’t wait to talk again soon.

Producer: All right. That was Sucheta and Dr. Ron Siegel. Wow, Sucheta, what a great conversation. This whole idea of mindfulness is so important and it’s something that I’m really, really passionate about. So great conversation. Any initial thoughts you want to share?

Sucheta: Yes, Todd. I think we humans need the validation. We need to feel accepted. We have a lot of anxiety and fear that comes from comparing ourselves with the others, we have bias towards negative thoughts and all that generates so much web of confusion and web of fear and anxiety and those are the thoughts and feelings that we operate from. And if we are coming from that place of insecurity and instability, certainly, our interactions with the world are certainly affected from executive function point of view. We need tools and strategies to regulate our emotions. What is regulating emotions? It’s nothing but bringing balance, bringing harmony but kind of really changing and shifting perspective within our mind and heart to not really panic and not get too carried away by the feeling that are festered in our heart.

I find the conversation we had with Dr. Siegel to be really poignant about guiding us to move towards that sense of equanimity. If we take a minute to think about this, how did we survive the most challenging  environment over thousands of years? We did survive using our sophisticated brain. So this brain as designed to outrank the challenges that existed. But in order to do that, the brain was constantly kept on high alert to notice any threats to survival. The survival threat came from not recognizing the difference between a predator and non-threatening entity. Now we don’t live in the wilderness that we are constantly threatened but this fear has now transported to more sophisticated cultural aspects of our survival which is am I being a part of a larger group? Do people like me? Am I included? Would I become a laughing stock? Whatever the fears are. That’s why we need mindfulness techniques to take better decisions to guide our attention to think about the larger picture. We can only do that once we regulate our emotions.

Producer: So how do we take charge of our own mind or do something like mind control? How do we do that?

Sucheta: Yes. Mind control, you use a very nice phrase. Mind control sounds crazy or sounds something artificial but it is mind redirecting, so to speak. Dr. Siegel describes this as a way to train our heart and mind to become more saner and become more mature and less reactionary. This reminds of of Nelson Mandela’s quote. He said, “As I walked out the door towards the gate that would lead to my freedom, I knew if I didn’t leave my bitterness and hatred behind, I would still be in the prison.” That, to me, is an example of how people who have managed to evolve do this successfully.

So the way to raise the emotional acumen is to recognize that the mind is the biggest culprit and the single source of suffering. It is looking for an instant release from any frustration, boredom or discomfort that is brought upon by now or that given moment. This myopic mind is hyperfocused on the need of the current self and as a result, it has no regard for the future self and it does not keep in check the nagging whisper that the dissatisfied mind can constantly talk about and it hijacks sanity.

When the mind doesn’t get what it wants or it is dissatisfied or discontent, it is all in all unhappy. And then that mind is the greatest source of inner tension. This inner tension also, as you can imagine, comes from our inability or poor capacity to endure the dissatisfaction or not getting what we want or not being able to keep what we have. If we flip it on its head, that’s what emotional regulation or mind control looks like which is to really sit with this tension or greatest dissatisfaction without feeling dissatisfied but kind of calmly tolerating the dissatisfaction.

Producer: Such a great quote from Nelson Mandela. I’ll be thinking about that one for a little while. Great stuff. All right. So we agree that a mindfulness practices is essential. I’m curious to know how you see it actually benefiting this mindfulness practice, how it benefits your clients.

Sucheta: That’s a very good question, Todd. So my third takeaway from this conversation was that mindfulness is nothing but deliberately getting rid of the self focus and building broader perspective and connect the now to the future as best as we can. This is a very important need of my client many of my clients will suffer from attention deficit or those who really struggle with poor decision making. They find it extremely difficult to stay organized and committed to the structure that they have been taught or they have been encouraged to impose. They resist because mind keeps whispering these words that, “Eh, this is boring,” or “Eh, this is not going to work.”

I find that bringing attention to the importance of their minds tells my clients becomes an important part of my work with them. I also remind a lot of my clients that great leaders has successfully done that and eventually that is what has made them great leaders, particularly if you look at those who has self-sacrificed for the greater good.

In my practice, another thing that I find really helps is a person with well-cultivated mindfulness practice is lot less compelled to act on feeling of desire and is less likely to think about himself and more about the consequences of his actions and its impact, not just for self but for the whole world or the larger group. That kind of thinking shift is exactly what executive function training looks like.

Producer: All right. Sucheta, before we close, any final thoughts?

Sucheta: Absolutely. Todd, an integral part of executive function mastery is to better emotional regulation. And for that, we need to spend time to understand ourselves, our mind, our emotions, and its connection to the behaviors and actions we take. The mind that is inherently wired to avoid challenges or to protect ourselves from the pain of negative experiences conveniently overlooks the good that happens around us. So one can mindfully bring attention back to the collective bundle of life experiences to help shift the heightened focus on the negative. So rather than reacting, one can cultivate the mind that begins to observe our reactions. In many Eastern practices, this is called witnessing. In Hindu spirituality, it’s called [00:37:03].

Let’s take advantage of the neuroplasticity principle from witnessing standpoint. The neuroplasticity principle says neurons that fire together wire together. So we need mindfulness tools to prompt our neurons to fire for simple victories, tiny positive instances, and the neural experiences that are sprinkled in between challenges in our lives so that they can create a permanent imprint in the neural structure for positivity. That’s how we can successfully change the way we think and change the way we feel.

Producer: Great stuff. Again, such a great conversation between you and Dr. Ron Siegel and I’m very much looking forward to next week’s conversation with Dr. Siegel. All right. Well, that’s all the time we have for today. On behalf of our host, Sucheta Kamath and all of us at Cerebral Matters, thank you for tuning in and listening and we look forward to seeing you again next week on Full PreFrontal.