Unbroken: Chapter 2
Your reality and how you navigate it are not merely products of your circumstances. They’re reflections of your mindset and perception. It’s like gazing into a mirror; what you see reflects how you choose to look at it. When your mindset and perception transform, so does the reflection. This chapter delves into how you can calibrate your mindset and perception to turn stumbling blocks into stepping stones and problems into solutions.
The Power of Mindset
A mindset is basically what you believe about yourself and the world. Carol Dweck, a psychologist from Stanford, explained this in her book, “Mindset: The New Psychology of Success”. She talks about two types of mindsets: “fixed” and “growth”.
If you have a fixed mindset, you think that you can’t change your talents or skills. If you fail at something, it feels like the end of the world. On the other hand, if you have a growth mindset, you believe that you can get better at things with practice. You see failure as a chance to learn and do better next time.
How you think when you face tough times can be like a ship’s rudder in a storm. If you have a growth mindset, you keep going, learning from the rough seas, and using that knowledge to find smoother waters.
Seeing Life Through Your Mindset
Think of your mindset like a pair of glasses that you use to see life. If you believe life is full of roadblocks you can’t get past, then that’s what you’ll see. But if you believe these roadblocks are chances to learn and grow, they become something else entirely. The difference is all in how you look at it.
Fixed vs Growth Mindset
People with a fixed mindset think they can’t get better at things. They often avoid challenges because they’re scared of failing. But people with a growth mindset believe they can improve with time and effort. They see challenges as chances to learn and get better. So, it’s easy to see how a growth mindset can help you become more resilient.
Changing Your Mindset
The cool thing about your mindset is that you can change it. You’re not stuck with it. You can go from a fixed to a growth mindset by becoming more self-aware, by changing how you talk to yourself about things, by realizing that it’s okay to be uncomfortable when you’re growing, and by giving yourself credit for trying hard, not just for getting results.
Mindset and Being Resilient
Having a growth mindset can really boost your ability to bounce back from tough times. If you see hard times as a chance to grow, you’ll be more likely to stick it out. If you see trying hard as a way to get better, then problems become stepping stones, not roadblocks. And if you believe you can improve, you give yourself the power to rise above tough situations.
Perception and Reality: A Neuroscientific Perspective
Perception is the brain’s way of interpreting the world based on past experiences and current inputs. Neuroscientist Dr. Beau Lotto explains that our brains use these inputs to make predictions and navigate uncertainties.
Your perception can become a trap, chaining you to pessimistic narratives that breed inaction. However, recognizing this gives you an opportunity to challenge your perception and reframe your reality. This isn’t about denying the truth of your obstacles but about changing how you interpret them.
Understanding How We See the World
Our brains interpret the world around us using our past experiences and the information we currently have. Neuroscientist Dr. Beau Lotto says our brains use this info to guess what might happen next and help us deal with unknowns.
Sometimes, our interpretation of the world can make us feel stuck or negative, leading to inaction. But knowing this lets us challenge our views and change the way we see our world. This doesn’t mean ignoring real problems. Instead, it means changing how we understand them.
The Brain Makes Our Reality
Science tells us something pretty mind-blowing: our brain isn’t just recording our lives, it’s actively creating our reality. Here’s what that means.
We often think of our brain as something that takes in information from our senses and responds to it. But it does more than just react; it takes this sensory info and builds our understanding of reality. Our brains filter, interpret, and even predict information to create a unique picture of the world for us. Each moment we experience is actually a complicated mix of sensory information, past experiences, beliefs, and expectations.
Take for example when you hear leaves crunching or smell a rose. The sounds and smells are your brain’s interpretation of specific signals. These signals don’t inherently sound crunchy or smell sweet. Your brain adds these qualities to your conscious experience. So, your brain is like an artist, painting every moment of your personal reality.
Knowing that our brain creates reality is key to understanding our ability to bounce back from tough times. How we interpret and respond to life’s challenges largely depends on our individual view of reality. By guiding our thoughts, changing our interpretations, and fostering a growth mindset, we can shape our brain’s reality-making process to strengthen our ability to bounce back.
So, the next time you face a problem, remember: your brain isn’t just experiencing reality, it’s making it. This knowledge gives us the power to actively change how we see, understand, and respond to life’s challenges. It’s a powerful reminder that we control our ability to bounce back.
Brain Changeability
While exploring the brain as a creator of reality, we can’t ignore the amazing ability of our brains to change, known as neuroplasticity. This gives us a hopeful sense of potential for change.
Neuroplasticity means our brains can change and adapt throughout our lives. Our brains aren’t static; they can transform. They reshape themselves based on our experiences, feelings, actions, and thoughts.
Neural pathways, the routes that allow different parts of our brain to communicate, are central to neuroplasticity. Imagine a busy city where information travels along highways and side roads – that’s your brain. Every thought, feeling, and experience you have is like cars on these roads. If one route is used a lot, it becomes a highway, improved for efficient traffic. The brain works in the same way, strengthening connections that are used often while unused ones fade. This is captured in the phrase, “neurons that fire together, wire together.”
Understanding neuroplasticity is vital when it comes to building resilience. When we face problems, our automatic reactions are often due to well-established neural pathways in our brain. These reactions can be negative and make us feel weak, such as fear, self-doubt, or feeling helpless. But realizing our brain can change means these responses are not permanent. Through conscious effort, we can form new, positive responses, building resilience by creating new routes in our minds.
By practicing mindfulness, positive affirmations, and changing our thoughts, we can strengthen good neural connections. With time and consistency, these new connections can become the brain’s default routes, letting us respond to problems with resilience and positivity.
Remember, your brain is always a work in progress, shaped by your experiences and thoughts. Every challenge is a chance to build and strengthen your resilience, creating a stronger response to life’s difficulties. Use neuroplasticity as a tool in your journey towards resilience, and remember: the power to reshape your brain, and thus your reality, is in your hands.
How Perception Affects Our Reactions
A crucial part of understanding the mind’s power is realizing that our perception shapes our responses. This is not just an abstract idea; it’s a real thing that affects how we live and deal with problems.
For example, if your boat capsizes, two people might react very differently. One might panic, overwhelmed by the sudden shock and potential danger. Another might stay calm, see it as a manageable problem, and start planning how to safely reach the shore. The event is the same, but the perceptions and therefore responses are different.
The main lesson here is that how we see a situation often has a bigger effect on our reaction than the situation itself. It’s not just what happens to us, but how we interpret what happens. Perception is the lens we view our world through, and it significantly influences our responses and behaviors.
What shapes our perceptions? Things like our past experiences, beliefs, values, attitudes, and even our current mood. If you’ve always heard scary stories about water, you’ll likely be more afraid if your boat capsizes. If you’ve spent your summers swimming and have good memories of water, you’ll see it differently.
The empowering part is this: While we can’t always control life’s events, we can control our perceptions of them. By intentionally shifting our perceptions, we can change our emotional reactions and responses. Essentially, we can choose to see a challenge as a threat or as a chance for growth.
Having a mindset that sees adversity as an opportunity to learn and grow — what psychologist Carol Dweck calls a ‘growth mindset’ — can greatly change how we handle difficulties. It helps us become resilient, ensuring we don’t just recover from setbacks but come out stronger and more capable.
In conclusion, remember, our perceptions shape our reality. By changing our perceptions, we can transform our responses, and in doing so, increase our resilience. We can turn life’s trials into stepping stones, shaping ourselves into stronger, more adaptable people. So, the next time you face a challenge, ask yourself: How am I seeing this, and could I see it differently? The answer could change everything.
Building Resilience
At the heart of our resilience journey is a hopeful truth: Our brains can change. We can ‘rewire’ them to build more resilience, and the key to this is a remarkable brain phenomenon called neuroplasticity. Let’s dive deeper into how we can use this to boost our resilience.
Again, neuroplasticity refers to our brain’s ability to change and adapt in response to new experiences, thoughts, actions, and emotions. Essentially, our brain reshapes itself to accommodate what we expose it to, strengthening connections between neurons that are used often and weakening those that aren’t.
So, how does this relate to resilience? Resilience is a set of skills and attitudes that we can learn and develop. The ability of our brains to change allows us to develop these resilience skills through practice and exposure to adversity.
We can build resilience by purposely doing things that challenge us, push us outside our comfort zones, and require us to adapt and grow. This could involve tackling tough tasks, persevering in the face of failure, or practicing mindfulness and emotion control techniques.
It also involves changing our mindset and how we see adversity. When we start seeing challenges as opportunities for growth rather than threats, our brain begins to form new neural pathways that support this view. Over time, these pathways become stronger, and our automatic reactions start to change. We become quicker to recover from setbacks, more adaptable to change, and less likely to be overwhelmed by stress.
Mindfulness practices such as meditation and deep-breathing exercises are another powerful way to rewire our brains for resilience. These practices can help us develop a greater awareness of our thoughts and emotions, enabling us to respond to adversity in a more thoughtful, less reactive way. Research has shown that regular mindfulness practice can actually lead to physical changes in the brain, including more grey matter in areas related to emotion control and stress reduction.
However, it’s important to remember that rewiring the brain takes time and consistent effort. Like training a muscle, building resilience is a gradual process that involves repetition, patience, and persistence. But with time and practice, we can develop a brain – and a mindset – that’s wired for resilience.
So remember: resilience isn’t a fixed trait; it’s a process. With the power of neuroplasticity, we can shape our brains to be more resilient and better prepared to handle life’s challenges. It’s a journey of growth, adaptation, and continuous learning – and each of us has the ability to embark on it.
Stoicism: How Ancient Wisdom Can Help Us Understand Ourselves
Sometimes, ideas from long ago can help us understand things today. One of these ideas is called Stoicism, an old way of thinking that was popular in ancient Greece and Rome. Stoicism helps us see that our feelings about things that happen to us are often more important than the things themselves.
One of the famous Stoic thinkers, Epictetus, once said something like, “People aren’t upset by things that happen, but by their thoughts about those things.” This means that we can stay calm and strong when bad things happen if we can control our thoughts about them.
Stoicism teaches us that we can control our own thoughts and actions, but we can’t control what other people do, or how the world works. When we focus on controlling our own thoughts instead of worrying about things we can’t control, we can understand and manage our feelings better.
How does this help us bounce back from tough times? Well, our thoughts about bad things that happen can either make us feel worse or help us feel better. If we think a problem is the end of the world, we’ll feel very stressed and it will be harder to recover. But if we see the problem as a hurdle to get over, or something to learn from, we’ll be able to keep our cool, adjust to the situation, and build our strength to bounce back.
Marcus Aurelius, another famous Stoic thinker, said something like, “You have control over your own mind, not what happens outside. When you understand this, you’ll find strength.” This means that by controlling our thoughts and reactions, we become stronger and can handle life’s ups and downs better.
So, if you feel like everything’s too much, remember this old wisdom: Focus on controlling your thoughts, not things outside your control. Accept things you can’t change and work on what you can – your own thoughts and reactions. This is a big part of being resilient, and it’s something you can practice every day.
Cognitive Behavioral Therapy: Easy Steps to Change Your Perspective
Let’s talk about a modern way to apply the ideas we’ve been discussing. It’s called Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, or CBT for short. CBT is a type of therapy that gives you easy tools to change how you see things. It helps you become more resilient, meaning it helps you bounce back when life gets tough.
CBT works on the idea that the way we think influences how we feel and act. So, if we have thoughts that aren’t helpful, they can make us feel bad and behave in harmful ways. The goal of CBT is to change these unhelpful thoughts, which in turn changes how we see and react to things.
CBT uses different methods to do this. One is called cognitive restructuring, which involves finding and changing thoughts that are causing problems. It’s like being a detective, finding clues to the truth. Another method is behavioral activation, which means doing things that can improve your mood and counter negative thinking.
Cognitive Restructuring
For example, imagine you failed a big project and think, “I’m a failure. I can’t do anything right.” That’s an unhelpful thought. CBT encourages you to question this thought, like “Is this really true? Have I never done anything right?” As you think about these questions, you’ll realize that you’ve succeeded before and one failure doesn’t define you. This is cognitive restructuring.
Cognitive restructuring is a method used in CBT that helps you identify, challenge, and change unhelpful thoughts or beliefs. The idea is to replace these problematic thoughts with more accurate and beneficial ones. Let’s dig a little deeper into the process.
Identifying Unhelpful Thoughts
This is the first step. Here, you would be on the lookout for thoughts that are negative or not helpful. These thoughts can be about yourself, others, or the world around you. For example, after failing a project, you might think, “I’m a failure. I can’t do anything right.” This thought is unhelpful because it generalizes a single instance of failure to your entire self-worth and capability.
Challenging Unhelpful Thoughts
Once you’ve identified an unhelpful thought, the next step is to challenge it. You do this by asking yourself questions that test the reality of the thought. For instance, you might ask, “Is it true that I can’t do anything right? Have I never succeeded at anything before?”
Replacing Unhelpful Thoughts
After challenging your unhelpful thoughts, the next step is to replace them with more helpful and realistic ones. You might acknowledge the failure but also remind yourself of past successes. You could replace the initial thought with, “I didn’t succeed at this project, but that doesn’t make me a total failure. I’ve done well at many other tasks and I can learn from this experience.”
Behavioral Activation
Next, you do something that makes you feel better or take on a small task you know you can do. This is behavioral activation. It reinforces the balanced thoughts you’re developing and helps shift your overall outlook. Behavioral activation aims to help you engage in activities that boost your mood and counteract negative thinking. The steps involved are:
Identifying Activities
First, you’ll identify activities that you enjoy or that you know can improve your mood. These could be anything from hobbies, exercise, spending time with loved ones, to completing small tasks that you’ve been putting off.
Planning Activities
Once you’ve identified potential activities, the next step is to plan to include them in your daily or weekly schedule. The goal is to ensure that you have positive experiences lined up that can help counteract negative thoughts and feelings.
Implementing Activities
Then, you go ahead and do these activities. The aim is to engage in them fully, paying attention to the positive feelings they evoke. It’s about breaking the cycle of negativity by introducing positive actions.
Reflecting on the Activities
After completing the activity, take time to reflect on how it made you feel. Did you enjoy it? Did it help improve your mood? Reflection can reinforce the benefits of positive activity and encourage you to do more of it.
In our example, after changing your thought to, “I didn’t succeed at this project, but that doesn’t make me a total failure,” you might decide to engage in an activity you enjoy or complete a smaller task that you’re confident you can accomplish. Doing so can reinforce your newly restructured thought and improve your overall mood.
In short, cognitive restructuring and behavioral activation are two interlinked strategies in CBT that work together to help change unhelpful thought patterns and replace them with more positive experiences and beliefs.
CBT gives you a clear, goal-focused way to solve problems. It offers real tools to manage your thinking. Practicing these techniques can change your perspective, make you more resilient, and improve your mental health.
The Power of Seeing Things Differently
Changing your perspective might sound easy, but it’s a powerful tool to help you bounce back from tough times.
At its simplest, this technique, also called “reframing”, involves seeing a negative situation in a more positive light. It’s like looking through a different lens. The situation doesn’t change, but the way you see it does, and that can make a big difference.
Have you ever taken a selfie with your phone? You look at the screen and adjust the angle of the phone then take the picture. But oh no! It looks horrible, your forehead or chin is too big, or maybe something unsightly in the background. So, you adjust the phone to put yourself in the frame differently … a different angle or perspective that makes the picture look the way you want it to. This is reframing.
Imagine standing in front of a big wall that blocks your way. It looks like a huge problem. But what if you saw it differently? The wall isn’t just a problem; it’s a challenge. Maybe it’s even a chance to prove how strong you are. The wall is still there, but instead of a problem, it’s now something that can help you grow.
Seeing things differently allows you to turn problems into opportunities. It lets you control your story and how you react to tough times. By choosing to see challenges instead of problems, you can become more resilient.
Like any skill, seeing things differently takes practice. It might feel strange at first, but over time it becomes easier. We start to see opportunities everywhere, and that’s when we realize that we can shape our own experiences.
Seeing things differently is an active choice. We can’t always choose what happens to us, but we can choose how we see and react to it. By seeing challenges as chances for growth, we become better equipped to bounce back from life’s difficulties. Seeing things differently doesn’t ignore the harsh realities of life, but it can help us handle those realities with greater strength, hope, and confidence. That’s the power of seeing things differently.
To conclude, remember: your reality is a mirror. The power to adjust the mirror lies within you, through the tools of mindset, perception, and reframing. By mastering these tools, you can turn your world into a realm of endless possibilities, reflecting back not what is, but what could be.