Why You Might Be Letting Your Brain Drain the Colour From Your Life — And What to Do About It
Some interesting research came out this week that I wanted to share with you. It’s about Emotional Regulation training. Don’t close me yet. I promise this is something you will find interesting. But first, to the garden. The mind garden that is. There is a lot of talk about neuroplasticity. The idea that we are building our brains. Creating new pathways and strengthening the ones that are already there. This could be applied to both good and bad pathways in your mind but this is sometimes quietly swept under the rug. What far fewer people are talking about is the idea of neural pruning. Yes, I do mean cutting stuff back.
To understand this better, I am going to invite you into my little thought bubble. I like to imagine that the stuff inside my head is not this grey blob of thinking goo but is a tree. My brainstem is the root and inside my head are thousands, upon thousands, maybe even millions of leaves. The leaves are our neurons. When we are born, we develop enough neurons to cope with a seemingly endless list of eventualities. Dropped in deepest darkest Africa, Tarzan style, no worries. Studies have shown that babies under nine months can identify individual monkeys (it’s a strangely wonderful study). Now I am not talking about monkey species, oh no, I am talking about individual monkeys. Sandra, Steve, Derek, Brian, Baloo, they are all there, all recognisable. And even more wild, the child can detect the noises they make as if they are their natural language. This is the case for any language. Dropped in China, cool. Born in sunny Venezuela, Hola.
Having the ability to understand this much information sounds fantastic, and it is when you are learning what keeps you alive, but it’s costly to the brain. Those leaves need a way to send that information back to where it needs to go so an infant brain is a tangled mess of branches called synapses. Which is energetically expensive. So the brain needs to choose what is useful and what is unnecessary. This is synaptic pruning.
We think around 8-9 months of age the pruning begins. It starts with visual and sensory synapses moving later to memory, executive functioning and emotional parts of the brain. Importantly once pruning starts, it never stops. This is where that trite phrase ‘use it or lose it’ comes from. Synapses, branches, that aren’t used or are used super infrequently get the chop. The leaf (neuron) is still there but being able to spot Sharon from Derek in a crowd, gone, unless you are actual Tarzan and the monkeys are your family.
This turns your grey matter from a wandering, weed like bramble into a you shaped topiary (I want mine to be a flamingo).
So far so good. Brain looking tight, everything beautifully tidy until…
Like I said, your brain keeps pruning. This, as you will know if like me you have ever looked at a plant in your garden and got a little too enthusiastic with the shears, can cause problems. Because the leaves are still there, each day our brains are reaching synapses out. If a branch isn’t used again, it gets chopped (my word not a science one). If we stop adding novelty into our lives our brain starts chopping stuff we like but don’t need. The things we need are things that keep us alive. Joy, happiness, contentment, wonder and awe are thrive emotions, not stay alive ones (I would argue differently but biology is biology). Fear and anxiety very definitely do. So if we live a life where we do the same thing every day, move the same way, wear the same clothes, see the same faces, go to the same places, we are letting our brains prune the colour from our days.
I will say it again though, for those who are living in grey scale, those leaves are still there. And we can grow new branches at any age.
We know that skill building, learning new languages, sudoku, chess, driving, cardio, lifting, gratitude, love and social connection strengthen those branches.
A question struck me about my own journey when I was researching this topic. When I first started to learn about feeling my feelings, opening that locked box in my soul marked ‘at your own peril’ I was exhausted.
The kind of tired I used to feel when I first started at the gym and I had no clue what I was doing. The same as the tired I felt after really hard yoga classes in the early days. The same tired as handstand practice when falling was definitely more the vibe than flying. I wondered if emotional skill building had the same effect on our brain as ‘practical’ skill building.
The research that followed suggested this was a valuable question.
Imagine someone who has spent years believing they have to be productive to be valuable (my hand is up for those reading).
They practise resting without guilt, which feels like sitting on an electric chair or an EMS mat. Over time, and practice, they begin noticing their own needs. They start to allow supportive relationships where nobody expects anything from them.
Over time, their responses might change.
What could be happening neurologically?
Their brain may be strengthening associations between rest and safety, altering responses to perceived threats, and developing more effective regulation of emotional reactions.
Some connections might weaken or be eliminated as the networks reorganise. My analogy is that fear starts to be protected by the brain. It starts to be able to be used when it is needed not as the only thing available. The other branches that are growing around it, the ones that can help you remember to look at the sky, to breathe consciously a few times a day, to take a moment to enjoy your coffee instead of mainlining it, become more easily accessible.
To get to the study I promised. Scientists in Illinois wanted to build on a 2021 study that looked at emotional regulation training in veterans. It aimed to offer a short course of training and measure the effectiveness long term, notably the changes in the brain. Their study with veterans worked remarkably well so they decided to target a new group who were still under stress, although not to quite the same degree, but whose brains were still growing – students. The training exercises the students were given included being asked to look at a picture of something unpleasant but to focus on the background of the picture, not the subject. At the end of the study, brain scans along with eye tracking measurements and questionnaires were conducted. It was concluded that those who had undergone the training had far less negative emotional response to the troubling image compared to the control group. It seemed that the training had helped to rewire the brain in such a way that more prefrontal cortex activity was seen and far less coming from the limbic system (the fire alarm part of your brain).
This brings me to spotting. In handstand, arm balance, any type of balance work in yoga, ringwork where you have to hold a point of focus you are training eye movement tracking (among other things but they are for a different article). In fact, in any difficult movement where you are concentrating and moving mindfully like heavy barbell lifts, your gaze is likely fixed you are doing the same. You can't be bobble heading when you have a heavy bar on your back, or deadlifting or benching. In the Illinois study the participants were trained to look away from an unpleasant image, there is no visible image in the gym (hopefully) but what if the image is in your head. Or that image is a voice. The one that is telling you horrible things. A voice that sounds remarkably like yours. If you have been here for a while, you will know that I call mine Nora. We all have one.
Could the practice of repeatedly doing something that tests our fear, turns Nora’s volume down or even off, be something akin to the training the Illinois research found?
Possibly. While this study didn’t focus on movement in regard to emotional regulation, there are a lot that have and their findings are clear.
Importantly, the researchers made it very clear that they were not trying to remove fear in their participants. They were training them to be able to see something that previously felt frightening and be less affected by it. Not not affected. Less affected.
I see this every single day in the gym. Confidence grows exponentially as soon as someone tries. The first kick up attempt which might get them nowhere near the wall, the first squat with an empty barbell on their back, the first time the try and get upside down on the rings, the first time they walk through the gym door. The fear doesn’t disappear but I suspect just that tiny novel act is adding to that fear protection basket in a way that is more powerful than data driven scientific testing is able to determine.
What does this mean for you?
Fear isn’t something you learn, it’s something you learn to protect.
Learning how to protect it means building a barrier of life enhancing things around it and it means continuing to nurture this barrier by feeding it with new things throughout our lives.
This is what allows our brains to age well and it allows us to bring the colour back into our lives. Physical movement is vital to everyone, no matter what age.
We know it builds physical resilience, now we have reason to believe that it also builds that fear protective emotional resilience bubble that has the potential to make life even more satisfying.
Your grey matter deserves more than a grey life.
And your grey years (if you choose to go grey) don’t need to be fear filled moments connected by the odd cup of tea.
