Sylvia's Journal

The things I have learned about the brain come in handy now. I understand better than before why centering practices, meditation, meditative yoga and other ‘stilling’ practices are important. As I prepare my sessions for working with teams that are coping rather than thriving in this new pandemicked world, I am going through the many centering exercises I have collected over the years to pick one for today’s session. 

In the past I felt a little self-conscious, awkward even, when I introduced a centering exercise at the start of a meeting.  Once, at a time of great anxiety and stress at my previous employer, I asked the people sitting around the table with me and those on a video screen in another location, to close their eyes and take a few deep breaths. I noticed how some people (mostly younger) embraced this opportunity, others (mostly older) rolled their eyes and seemed impatient to get on with the task at hand. 

It was risky telling people that being present, centered, and taking a few deep breaths before continuing with the meeting agenda, should be part of the task at hand. But now I am no longer the only one who believes that. There is now abundant research to suggest that centering and being present is a critical part of any work. After all, any, internal or external, change we want to make starts in the here and now. If your mind is elsewhere, either in the past or in the future, the change cannot start.

I made up the word pandemicked because it has the word panicked inside it. We know that panic is created by our old reptilian brain that is solely concerned with surviving. Our very existence now attests to how the effectiveness of this part of the brain to do what it was designed to do.  

The pandemic has brought to the fore the original meaning of surviving, which is about continuing to live and defy death, this in addition to psychological survival, which is the usual cause of our stresses and anxieties. Now there is a real existential threat because the corona virus could kill us, as it already has killed so many people. The new closing messages on emails are now ‘stay safe,’ because if we don’t, we, or others, might die.

Our reptilian brain is not very good at coherent thought. This capacity resides in the most evolved part of our brain, the prefrontal cortex. Our reptilian brain leads us to take sensory short cuts; it leads us to believe things to be true that are not, it leads us to jump to conclusions based on very little evidence. When this part of our brain is in the driver’s seat we do stupid things because we can’t think clearly about anything other than escaping danger in the here and now. We’ll deal about the consequences later, once the prefrontal cortex is back in the driver’s seat. 

When we are on such high alert, it’s our sympathetic nervous system that is activated and floods us with neurochemicals preparing our bodies to run away from the threat. But the corona virus is invisible and all around us, increaSing our sense of danger. Taking even a few minutes to breathe deeply and slowly, and still our mind, activates the parasympathetic nervous system. Gratitude practices, going into our happy place, imagining being with or holding someone or something we love or care deeply about, produces neurochemicals that enhance our well-being, our well-feeling and our immune system, in ways that brain scientists can explain so much better than I.