Words Can Change Your Brain (3 page)

A relaxed, meandering conversation turns out to have other benefits as well. For example, it can reduce social anxiety in people who feel uncomfortable when entering new situations. It also allows a person to gain access to deeper levels of unconscious material without becoming overwhelmed by its contents. This component of Compassionate Communication is related to the Freudian psychoanalytic process of free association and the meditation practice known as mindfulness. Both strategies help an individual to remain relaxed and in the present moment, where they can watch the productions of their busy, noisy mind without becoming caught up in a myriad of distracting thoughts.

The Neuroscience of Mindfulness and Compassion

In the 1970s mindfulness practices were introduced to the medical community, and they are now considered one of the most effective ways to reduce stress and improve health. In the 1990s mindfulness began to transform the world of psychotherapy. By remaining deeply relaxed and observant of their feelings and thoughts, patients were able to reduce their anxiety, depression, and irritability. They didn’t have to do
anything other than to watch themselves with detachment.

As interest in mindfulness continued to grow, teams of neuroscientists began to explore the neurological correlates of this unusual way of thinking. As they observed the brains of hundreds of people while they practiced various forms of relaxation, stress reduction, and meditation, they discovered a common effect. Mindfulness not only increased a person’s ability to control destructive emotions, it also improved the cognitive functioning of the brain, especially in areas relating to language and social awareness.

Our own brain-scan research found that the strategies incorporated in mindfulness could strengthen the neural circuits associated with empathy, compassion, and moral decision making, and it even appears to enhance our ability to be more aware of the workings of our own consciousness. As we began to study the latest findings concerning the coevolution of language and the brain, we realized that the principles of mindfulness could be directly applied to our conversations with other people.

Speaking Briefly and the “Thirty Second” Rule

The neuroscience of language, consciousness, and communication raises many fundamental questions, the answers to which consistently defy definition. For example: When we speak, where do our words come from? Our brain or our mind? And what do we mean by mind? Is it purely a production of the brain, or is it something else? The evidence suggests that the mind and the brain are interconnected, but it remains a mystery as to what, or where, that connection is. Indeed, it even appears that the mind has a “mind” of its own, and so does the brain! Similar dilemmas arise when we try to study the nature of consciousness. Hypotheses abound, but nobody really seems to know.

However, we do have a few clues that illuminate the relationship between the brain, our thoughts, and the ability to communicate effectively. For example, everyday consciousness seems to be dependent on an area of the frontal lobes where short-term “working memory” is processed. Our brain stores a tremendous amount of information in long-term memory, but when carrying out a task it must select only the pieces of information that relate to that task in a meaningful and appropriate way.

How much information can our conscious mind hold in its working memory? About four “chunks,” and it can hold them only for thirty seconds or less (we’ll explain this in more detail later). This tiny bit of information, contained in a tiny window of time, is what we use to communicate our needs to others. This evidence convinced us to modify Compassionate Communication in a fundamental way: when conversing with others, we realized, we should limit ourselves whenever possible to speaking for no more than twenty or thirty seconds. Even a single sentence can contain more than four chunks of information.

Most people say, “But I need time to explain!” That may be true, but if you talk for several minutes, the other person’s brain will only recall a fraction of what you’ve said, and it might not be the part you wanted to convey. The solution? Brevity followed by intense listening to make sure that the other person has grasped the key points of what you said. If they have, great! You can say another sentence. If not, why move on? If the other person hasn’t understood you, what good will it do?

In business, time is money, so brevity is a highly valued trait. In fact, some executives insist that important questions and statements be written down on an index card. Once condensed to fit the card, the most important information can be conveyed in the briefest period of time. It’s also a great brain-training exercise. The act of writing down a thought forces us to formulate our message in a meaningful, concise, and accurate way.

When we limit ourselves to speaking for only thirty seconds, the brain quickly adapts by filtering out irrelevant information. There’s another advantage to speaking briefly: it limits our ability to express negative emotions.

The Problem of Negativity

Extreme brevity keeps the emotional centers of the brain from sabotaging a conversation. Anger is averted before it begins, and, as we will emphasize throughout this book, anger rarely works. Neuroscience supports this premise, but this discovery contradicts the popular belief that people need to express their feelings of frustration to effectively process anger. If you don’t, some therapists believe you’re not being honest or true to yourself.

Yet the moment a person expresses even the slightest degree of negativity, it increases negativity in both the speaker’s and listener’s brains. Instead of getting rid of anger, we increase it, and this can, over time, cause irreparable damage, not only to relationships, but to the brain as well. It can interfere with memory storage and cognitive accuracy, and it can disrupt your ability to properly evaluate and respond to social situations.
⁸
It interferes with making rational decisions,
⁹
and you’re more likely to feel prejudice toward others.
¹⁰
What makes anger particularly dangerous is that it blinds you even to the fact that you’re angry; thus it gives you a false sense of certainty, confidence, and optimism.
¹¹

Expressing anger is destructive, but this does not mean that we should completely repress negative feelings. That too can be quite damaging, because unconscious anger—and the constant flow of stress hormones and neurochemicals it releases—can literally eat you alive, damaging the emotional-regulation centers of the brain.

Research shows that the best way to deal with negativity is to observe it inwardly, without reaction and without judgment. The next step is to consciously reframe each negative feeling and thought by shaping it into a positive, compassionate, and solution-based direction. As the esteemed psychologist Barbara Fredrickson has demonstrated, it’s important to generate a minimum of three to five positive thoughts in response to every negative reaction you have. When you do, your work will thrive and your personal relationships will blossom.
¹²
If you don’t, your relationships and work will wither.

There’s another way to prevent negativity from creeping into the conversation: express frequent comments of appreciation. The more the better, but they need to be heartfelt and genuine. Talk about positive events in your life and avoid complaining about the world. When it comes to positive and negative feelings, the brain responds like an on-off switch: it cannot focus on both at the same time, and as we will explain in the next chapter, negativity is more powerful. That’s why we have to maintain the highest positivity ratio we possibly can if we want our work, relationships, and lives to flourish.
¹³

Think Before Speaking

As our research evolved, we found that speaking spontaneously, without censorship, could sometimes cause problems for the listener. So we added another rule: before you speak, ask yourself, can the other person hear what I’m about to say without becoming upset? If the answer is no or even maybe, then put that thought aside for a moment, or write it down on a sheet of paper. At a later time, the other person may be more receptive to what you want to say, and in the meantime you’ll be able to think about alternative ways of getting your message across.

In business a poorly phrased statement can undermine an important sale or even cost a person their job. But many people fail to realize that the same principle applies to personal and family relationships. Why do we tend to ignore the strategy of thinking before we speak at home? There are many reasons, but one of the most common is tiredness. Exhaustion from a long day of intense work slows down the compassion circuits in the brain. We become impatient, and we lose some of our ability to think clearly. In this state, negative comments can slip out because we simply don’t have the energy to turn them off.

Another reason we may not think before we speak is that we grew up in a family with poor communication skills. Illness and aging can also interfere with the neural circuits governing language and emotion, causing us to speak in ways that are difficult for other people to handle.

Of course expressions of frustration and irritability during conversations are unavoidable, but when they happen, you need to do some reparation work. Sometimes a simple apology will suffice, but the best way to handle an emotional blunder is to ask the other person how they were affected. Just showing interest, and being fully present in your blunder, can be enough to reinstate mutual trust and respect. If you stay deeply relaxed during this delicate exchange of words, you’ll be able to handle your frustration, or the other person’s irritability, with greater diplomacy and tact.

Unlearning How to Speak

Nearly all the research conducted in the fields of communication suggests that we dialogue poorly with one another. And yet most people believe they are effective communicators. How can that be? How can we be oblivious to our own shortcomings? Neuropsychologists have an explanation: “positivity bias.”
¹⁴
Believing we are better than we actually are turns out to be neurologically enhancing! It gives us confidence and hope in the most difficult situations; without it, we are more likely to give up and fail. Having a positivity bias helps us to maintain emotional stability, and the part of the brain most activated is the anterior cingulate, a key center for generating compassion toward others.
¹⁵

As we’ll explain in the next several chapters, the development of our basic language skills tends to culminate around the age of twelve. It’s enough to get us through elementary school, but the finer aspects of communication and social awareness are regulated by parts of the brain that don’t become fully operative until our late twenties or early thirties.

The metaphor of riding a bicycle comes to mind. We learn how to ride when we are young, but if you want to excel
at bicycling, you have to
unlearn
the bad habits you acquired in your earlier years and replace them with more efficient skills. To be an expert bicyclist, you need to delve into the mechanics of balance and motion, and to immerse yourself fully in the
experience
of riding. And you have to practice, practice, practice.

The same applies to communication. We learn the basics in grammar school and high school, but if you want to excel at communicating, you have to unlearn many bad habits and replace them with advanced skills like empathetic listening. You have to study the mechanics of verbal inflection, and you have to learn how to read facial expressions that most people tend to ignore. You have to immerse yourself fully in the experience
of speaking and listening, and you have to practice, practice, practice.

To improve our conversational skills, we need to do four things:

1. Recognize the limits of our personal communication styles.

2. Interrupt old, habituated patterns of conversing.

3. Experiment with new communication strategies long enough to build new neural circuits and behaviors.

4. Consciously apply these strategies when we talk with others.

How long does it take to experience the beneficial effects of these new communication strategies? Based on the data we’ve gathered, less than an hour. We’ve been able to measure an 11 percent increase in social intimacy and empathy in individuals who practice Compassionate Communication with two or three different people, for ten minutes each. That’s an astonishing finding, and so far there are no other communication strategies that have been able to generate the same degree of effectiveness.

A New Science of Communication

In the first part of this book, we’ll present the most recent evidence on how the brain processes language, speech, and listening. We’ll explain how language builds a unique brain and how trust and cooperation are developed and conveyed to others. We’ll take you through each of the twelve strategies of Compassionate Communication and share with you the neuropsychological studies that support them.

Then we’ll guide you through a twenty-minute interpersonal exercise that incorporates these strategies in a way that will enhance the communication circuits of your brain. Along the way, you may discover that many of your old notions of conversing with others need to be jettisoned and replaced by new forms of speaking and listening.

When doubt creeps in—which happens whenever we try to change old behaviors—we ask that you try to suspend your current belief systems as you experiment with the exercises in this book. By assuming a “beginner’s mind,” we can teach our old brain some newer tricks that will deepen our connection to others.

We’ll introduce you to several techniques that effectively eliminate doubt, worry, and procrastination, and in the final chapters we’ll share with you how different people—lovers, parents, children, therapists, teachers, financiers, entrepreneurs, and business executives—have applied Compassionate Communication to their work and lives.