Neuroscience Nuggets #8: Who Am I This Time?

Have you ever found yourself deep in a Netflix binge wondering why you boomerang back night after night? 

Well that’s what it’s felt like for me the last few weeks, only the Netflix series I’ve been binging on is my past. 

Since the world reopened to travel, my mind has been accumulating massive mileage traveling back and forth in a time spiral, digging up old memories of people, situations and places that I haven’t visited in years. 

Why now? Is it middle age settling in? Or is there some secret message I’m supposed to decrypt on the great memory train I keep finding myself on?

These questions and the overarching theme of "nostalgia" have been my obsession for the last three weeks, and my fascination has led me to this neuroscience nugget that I’m excited to share with you today. 

Recent brain imaging has shown that thinking about our past self is the same as when we're thinking about another person!


That's right, when our brain consciously reflects on older versions of ourselves, it's akin to watching someone else's life unfold.


It’s the brain’s way of distinguishing “me-today” from “not-me-anymore,” which makes space for a more fluid, context-dependent narrative about who we are as we progress in time. 

This especially occurs following significant personal shifts, like changing jobs, schools, relationships, and, in my case, changing country, culture and language!

What that means is that from one moment to the next, we really do leave a part of ourselves behind. 

When I asked my neuroscience professor why this temporal-identity distancing might make sense from an evolutionary perspective, she said “It allows us to be better attuned to what we need in our lives today.” Makes sense, right?

Wallowing in the past can be an easy refuge from the stressors and responsibilities of today’s prolonged pandemic (and I must admit that’s what’s made my binge so addictive), but we can get much more out of the mileage. 

How about, when we find ourselves in a nostalgia tunnel, we ask ourselves:  "What energy from past versions of myself do I want more or less of in my life today?"  

In my case, that question has brought up some very interesting discoveries. 

1. That I’ve been hovering over my kid's school life in a hyper protective way with the same kind of controlling energy that consumed me decades ago when I tried to help a close friend academically.

2. That I want to experience the thrill of pouring myself into a complex challenge without knowing where it will take me. 

3. That I have the stamina and focus to buckle down with a long-haul writing project as long as I’m curious about what I’m learning along the way. 

4. That I desperately miss the days of my "no-longer-me" youth when my crew of friends and I would turn every gathering into a raucous dance party heavy on Stevie Wonder and Chaka Khan. 

That’s all I’ve got on this neuroscience nugget today but I feel there's more in there to explore.

In the meantime, what about you? What does your “not-me-anymore” self have to share with your “me-today” self about what you want more or less of in your future?

Hit me up and let me know!

PS. I borrowed the name for this post from one of my favorite sleeper movies ever, a short story film with Christopher Walken and Susan Sarandon called "Who Am I This Time," based on a Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. short story. It's brilliant, check it out.

Neuroscience Nuggets #7: How To Find Your Flow

I’m immersed in what I’m doing. All of my senses are on high-alert. Ideas are bubbling, progress is being made, there's a giddy satisfaction rippling through my body and time is flying by so fast I have to remind myself to come up for air. 

It happens when I’m cooking, writing, playing tennis, and hanging out with friends. 

But most often it happens when I’m coaching.

This inimitable “in the zone” state is called "flow."

Everyone since the dawn of time has experienced it at some point or another, but it wasn’t officially discovered until Hungarian Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (who sadly passed away last week) coined the term in 1975. 

Csikszentmihalyi set out to discover how and why people feel enjoyment in their everyday lives. From artists and chess players to leaders and farmers, for years he studied their daily habits and activities, trying to find that *exact* moment when people feel totally in synch with whatever they’re doing without needing any external motivation to do so.

His research landed on "flow," the moment in time when interest and skill are in perfect harmony, when you feel intrinsic joy and purpose without extreme effort. 

Csikszentmihalyi defines "flow" as “a state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience is so enjoyable that people will continue to do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.”

What's amazing about "flow" (and which leads us to our neuroscience nugget today) is what happens in the brain when you’re in it. Or better yet, what doesn’t happening in the brain.

Since "flow" occurs in the sweet spot between arousal (aka challenge) and control (aka skill), your brain is not experiencing the anxiety of trying to accomplish something beyond its reach, nor is it wandering aimlessly looking for some sort of internal or external distraction. 

Your brain’s attention is so focused on what it's doing that anything unrelated to the task at hand, including self-consciousness, self-doubt, and negative self-speak, is literally squeezed out of the equation. 

When in "flow," “existence is temporarily suspended,” says Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, in his must-watch Ted Talk, so much so that your doubts, hunger, fatigue, and even your kids can’t seem to shake you out of what you’re doing. 

This is what I love most about "flow": 

1. Being in "flow" is deeply personal, non-hierarchical and non-discriminatory. You can feel like Beyoncé at Coachella even when you’re setting a table for your dinner guests, creating spreadsheets for your clients or doing a workshop on Zoom.

2. "Flow" is neither about forcing yourself out of our comfort zone to prove your self-worth, nor about avoiding risks at all costs. It's about the sweet spot in-between stretch and security. 

3. You can find meaning—and "flow"—in all types of professions. You don’t have to be a brain surgeon or the head of NGO to feel a joyful purpose in life. 

So what are the take-aways here?

• We need both arousal (aka challenge) and control (aka skill) to make "flow" happen. It’s that very special space where our challenges and our skills dance together like Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey .
  

• If you're experiencing too much overwhelm at a given task, think about what practical skills you could hone to rise to the occasion (like those steamy nights of "practice" between Swayze and Grey).
  

• And if your tasks are feeling pretty stale around the edges, find a way to put your skills to a stretchy challenge, like Swayze teaching a rhythmless teenager how to dance like a pro.

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Neuroscience Nuggets #6: The Progress Loop

I had a misty-eyed “goodbye for now” send off recently with a client who just wrapped up her coaching program with me. 

We went through the coaching goals created in our first sessions together, celebrating them line by line and shrieking at times because many of her wilful predictions came true in larger-than-expected ways. 

Like her goal to grow deeper in her field as a writer and journalist, develop and share her unique perspective on her subject matter with a wider audience. 

At the time she wrote that goal, the thought of speaking in public literally made her queasy. 

But guess what, not only has she been interviewed on podcasts, she just launched her own podcast and signed with a NYC literary agent who’s working with her on her first book proposal.

But how did she get there? How did she suddenly become so confident, scoring agents, speaking gigs and launching podcasts?

Those are all great questions, and they lead me to this week’s neuroscience nugget:

The common misconception is that in order to launch a new project, say the hard thing, or stand up for a cause, you first need to hit the “confidence store” to stock up on motivation like a jumbo pack of toilet paper before a pandemic. 

But the neuroscience shows that motivation and confidence are generated because of action, not before it. 

We need to first do the thing in order to reap the benefits of feeling confident and motivated. 

It’s our brain’s reward response for experiencing success at a particular task. 

But how can we hack the system so that we know we’ll be successful at a task before we do it?

The simplest way to do that is to break our goals down into small, 100% achievable steps that we know we can’t fail at.


The process is called the progress loop, or The Progress Principle, a concept coined by authors Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer during their research into the forward momentum of meaningful work. 

With each new small success, your brains says “way to go, you did it!” by creating a neurotransmitter called Dopamine that makes you feel motivated and empowered to go after the next small challenge on your list. 

For my client, Paige McClanahan, the progress loop kicked off when she said yes to a speaking opportunity even though the thought of doing it made her want to vomit. 

So, the first task was something she knew she could succeed at: just say yes to the opportunity. 

“I knew if I said no it would be out of fear,” she explains. “It was saying yes that led to the next step of growth. It wasn’t perfect, but in a sense that was the most motivating thing about it. The overriding emotion was confidence that I could do it better the next time. And then, all of the sudden, the idea for a podcast came to me fully-formed.”

“The Better Travel Podcast,” which Paige launched this week, never would have seen the day had she not begun the progress loop by simply saying yes to an opportunity. 

So, now here are some questions for you:

1. What important personal or professional goal is just so damn huge that your brain can’t muster the motivation to go after it?

2. How could you break that goal down into totally achievable bite-size chunks that you know you can succeed?

3. What’s the easiest first step you can take to kick off the progress loop and get your brain’s reward response working on your behalf?

Neuroscience Nuggets #5: Emotional Guessing Game

Novak Djokovic, the world’s #1 men’s tennis player and potentially G.O.A.T, rarely shows emotion unless he’s smashing rackets, violently screaming, or accidentally hitting balls at line judges. (Honestly, I’m not a fan though I totally respect what an outstanding athlete he is.)

Yet on Sunday night, as he teetered on the imminent edge of unexpected defeat, the crowd at the US Open Final match rose to its feet to encourage him on, shouting his nickname "Nole, Nole, Nole" in unison. 


Novak smiled, waved to the crowd and then did something completely out of character: he showed he was a real human being. 

Peaking out from beneath his towel as he wiped the sweat from his face, viewers caught sight of a twisted, anguished mouth that looked like it walked off a Francis Bacon painting. 

It became suddenly clear that the typically stoic, unflappable super athlete was having a big, ugly, uncontrollable cry. 

And it was shockingly beautiful.
 

But what was it? What exact human emotion was Novak expressing?
 

• Was it joy from feeling the love and support of a hard-knocks crowd that usually jeers at him?

• Was it the dread of letting everyone down?

• Was it a release of the weight of expectation?

• Was it frustration and fear?

• Was it physical pain?

• Exhaustion?

The truth is that no one besides Novak could really know what the tears were about because, and here comes today’s neuroscience nugget: emotions aren’t uniform, universal reactions to life that have ready-made ways of showing up on our faces and in our bodies.


You can’t know what someone is feeling just by looking at them.

You may think that when you look at someone's face you can understand exactly how they feel. But in fact your brain is guessing, and it's using your own past experiences to make those guesses. 


We construct our own emotional experience, and our perception of others’s emotions, on the spot.

“Emotions are your brains’ best guess of how you should feel in the moment,” explains neuroscientist and author of How Emotions Are Made, Lisa Feldman Barret. 

They're your brain’s “creations” of what your bodily sensations mean in relation to what is going on around you in the world, and those “creations” are the sum of three distinctly subjective ingredients:

1. Your internal bodily cues (heart rate, muscle contraction, temperature, etc)

2. Your external surroundings (what you see, hear, smell, taste, touch)

3. Your past experiences (and how those past experiences compare to the present)

“Our emotion concepts vary widely from culture to culture. They come with a rich set of rules, all in the service of regulating your body budget or influencing someone else’s," says the founder of The Neuroscience School, Dr. Irena O’Brien. "That’s why we shouldn’t assume that we know how someone else is feeling from their facial expression or body language."

So what do Novak's mysterious tears have to do with you?

1. It’s easy to assume you know someone’s emotional state through observation, but you’re really just guessing through your own experiential lens. If you want to know what someone is truly feeling, you need to ask them.

2. Be it your boss, your spouse, your kids, your friends, you shouldn't assume that any one can correctly read the emotions you’re feeling either. Best way for them to know what you’re feeling is to go out on a limb and tell them. 

So, what emotion was Novak truly expressing on the courts? Click here to hear all about it from the "Joker" himself.