As humans we naturally have something called “Negativity Bias” programmed into us as a means of keeping us safe, and it is this mechanism in our emotional brain that triggers the fight, flight or freeze reaction in us that has helped to keep us safe throughout history. However, in the interest of avoiding danger at all costs, our emotional brain can overestimate threats and underestimate our ability to handle them, resulting in our focusing more on the negative than the positive as we try to make sense of the world.
A significant issue with the Covid-19 threat is how insidious its effects can be where, on the surface we think we are doing OK, and yet subconsciously we are experiencing anxiety and stress. It is often only when the symptoms of these underlying problems show up that we realize how much this pandemic is affecting us individually. Pandemic isolation and worry can even alter brain chemistry and cause mood disorders such as anxiety or depression.
The downside of social media in today’s world is that negative news is more likely to be perceived as truthful since negative information captures greater attention and, as a result, we tend to see it as having greater validity. Instead of staying trapped by frustration, anxiety, and worry however, its possible for us to re-engineer our brain and to begin self-calming ourselves from these worries and fears.
Thanks to fMRIs (functional magnetic resonance imaging) neuro-scientists have now shown that the human brain is plastic, and each of us has the ability to over-ride our brain’s hard-wired, automatic fear reactions. This phenomenon is known as neuro-plasticity which allows us to use our “thinking mind” to rewire the structure and functioning of our brain, and it is by these means that we can become more hardy and resilient.
According to Neuroscientist David Eagleman, author of “Livewired,” the COVID-19 lock-down is actually re-wiring our brain without our even realizing it. He says our brains are continually in flux, responding to the surrounding world and that, brain plasticity is far more extensive than we realize, where neurons are constantly fighting with other neurons over control of different regions of the brain. He even suggests that this is the reason we are each a slightly different person than we were a week ago or a year ago.
By actualizing a growth mindset we can choose how to deal with the environment rather than unconsciously allowing the environment to unnecessarily control us.
One way to mitigate this automatic response to the pandemic is to practice staying in the present moment as much as possible. This can be achieved through mindful meditation, yoga, and deep breathing since these activate the parasympathetic nervous system (our rest and digest response) thereby off-setting our sympathetic nervous system (fight-or-flight response.)
Brain scans conducted at both Harvard and UCLA have shown that regular practice of mindfulness meditation minimizes brain shrinkage and cognitive decline and builds thicker neural tissues in the prefrontal cortex or thinking brain region. By practising relaxation exercises, such as those mentioned above, we can introduce new neural pathways into our brain, thereby changing negative patterns of anxious pandemic thinking to one where we have a larger perspective and much more stillness, calm and positivity.
By engaging the prefrontal cortex this way we can realize that things are not necessarily as bad as our survival brain is registering them to be. This is not about looking through rose-colored glasses, but instead widening our vision to see the big picture so that we can gain perspective on what appears to be a threatening situation. When our “thinking” brain gives feedback to our “emotional” brain and we perceive ourselves as being in a safe space, we can then shift the way we experience a situation.
This comes down to what is known as having an internal locus of control, and by practising whole brain thinking we can cause our thinking and emotional brain to work together under our control instead of letting circumstances such as the current Pandemic to manage and control us.
