Thank you! my FB pal, Sharon Smith, for sharing such an interesting article about a really cool research study !
(This study provides biological evidence validating the idea that "positive" and "negative" people's brains function differently. http://msutoday.msu.edu/news/2014/positive-negative-thinkers-brains-revealed/#sthash.XbeFLxwR.dpuf. All research that tries to figure out how our physical brains & bodies are functioning & reacting is important.
These findings make sense to me that any neural brain wiring that has been used, conditioned & reinforced over & over in specific thoughts or behavior patterns (as with worriers) becomes some major highways of neural networking.
Although I concur with lead researcher, Jason Moser's, comments on the research findings in his Michigan State University study (which appears in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology), I must object strongly to this article's choice of WORDING that being "negative is hard wired in the brain".
Although this research can help us understand some of the many reasons it is difficult to change negative thought patterns, this "hard wired" wording literally takes away hope that they have an ability to change unhealthy patterns. Most "negative" thinkers frequently take research out of context to justify why they can not change their ill health & thought patterns to their own detriment.
Research shows that our lower brains are hard wired to respond to survival stresses with "negative" emotional responses of fear with fight, flight or freezing. I accept research that concludes that during our 1st 7+ years of life we are mostly imprinted, programmed & conditioned to feel & think "negatively" by our families & society. I accept that most people then spend the following years of their lives reinforcing those "negative" emotions, thought patterns & beliefs by unconsciously repeating them 1000's (and 1000's!) of times over.
But if people believe they are "hard wired" to be "negative" worriers or depressed, this leaves them feeling totally powerless to change. If we only see "negative" thinking as a brain HARDware problem, how could anyone ever change? We have a current hopeless society that just wants to zone out with TV, sugar, alcohol & drugs so not be responsible for their own thoughts.
Seeing thinking patterns as SOFTware programs that with replay either reinforces old wiring pathways or creates new wiring pathways in the brain is positively congruent with our human ability to change our emotions, thoughts, beliefs, actions. Neural wiring pathways do not mean that "negative" patterns have been drilled permanently into granite. In fact, neural brain wiring pathways have been shown to be actually quite "plastic" in the brain's healthy ability to adapt & create new neural networks, no matter what our age & background. Lack of use allows the neural networks to weaken. What thoughts are we choosing to strengthen or weaken in ourselves?
As an old dog trainer, we have a saying, "dogs do what works for dogs." If you want to change what your dog is doing, you gotta change how your dog's behavior is working to benefit your dog from the dog's point of view. Let's say my dog has a "negative" habit of barking out of fear to the UPS man knocking on the front door. Every time the behavior of barking (a pre-fight response behavior to my dog's fear) successfully "chases away" the "evil" UPS man, that behavior is reinforced until it becomes a pretty strong behavior response.
Now, my view that this barking is a "negative" behavior is because it is annoying to me & I don't want my dog to do it. From my dog's point of view, he is a HERO, relieved AND proud that once again he chased away a bad guy without even a fight! If I want to change my dog's behavior, it doesn't matter how much I label it "negative". It doesn't really matter how much I yell at him during or after he barks. From my dog's emotional syntax, he's pretty happy with the status quo of experiencing the little bit of fear that triggers his barking because it works out just fine for him at the end. He has proven once again that he successfully protected himself, me & our territory from the perceived danger. My yelling disapproval is a small price for him to pay. (My yelling may even sound to my dog like I am joining in the barking along with him! In which I become an encouraging comrade in arms...) He even gets an exciting & uplifting conditioned adrenaline rush while he proves to himself over & over that barking works!
Only by being mindful can I truly change my dog's motivation for his behavior. If my original interpretation is correct that my dog originally barks out of fear, it a relatively simple process to change my dog's behavior by changing the context of the emotional meaning of the entire situation for my dog. The successful "habit" of "fear" of the UPS man can eventually be changed by preventing a reoccurrence of this old behavior program while my dog has the repeated experiences of his getting super yummy treats at the arrival of the the UPS man parking his truck. This eventually becomes a new program of "happy expectation" of the UPS man for my dog instead of "fear expectation".
In many ways, people are no different than other animals, because they respond with their learned "negative" emotional & thought patterns because those responses have somehow "worked" for that person. As long as a "negative" response behavior keeps someone feeling 1) safe, 2) supports their unconscious self identity, or 3) benefits them in any other way, they will continue to feel & response in the "negative" patterns that they know and that work for them.
We must always remember that our judgement of "negative" & "positive" are simply our outside interruptions of another's internal response without the context in which the "negative" responses were created & are still being held.
As this study's research supports, it has been my experience that worriers believe that worrying will somehow prevent that which they are worried. Staying stuck in their worrying program keeps them from seeing any other possibilities than worrying. They prove in their minds over & over to themselves why they should continue to worry.
The majority of people are not willing to even consider looking at how they think, let alone tackle the process of changing how they think, unless their old patterns are bringing them DIRE consequences.
After all, they have put a lot of energy into experiencing these thoughts the hard way. They don't want to get out of their habit comfort box, even if they are unhappy, because outside of their comfort box is unknown & not proven safe. We are taught early in life that it is better to be unhappy than unsafe. Until people NEED to look at life differently, most justify & rationalize holding on to their old "negative" habits & perceptions, seeing life through only those lenses.
When we consciously choose "positive thinking" and to be more "mindful", can we begin to challenge our conditioned "negative" emotional responses & begin the process of reprogramming how we think & viewing the world differently. Initially it can take enormous effort to stop using those comfortable "negative" programs on the neural super highways of our brains rather than create new roads for new programs. But it does not have to be so much effort by understanding that, like training my dog to look forward to the UPS man, all that is really needed is to change the emotional context with new programs that create more desirable results.
There is much research that demonstrates that when people are WILLING to change their emotional outlooks & mental perceptions on life, they can reprogram almost any "negative" context to a "positive" one.
It really is all about conscious willingness.
