Words Can Change Your Brain (5 page)

Can we train our brain to become more responsive to “yes”? We think so but in an indirect way, through intense,
repetitive focusing on positive images, feelings, and beliefs. And it doesn’t matter if the positive thinking is grounded in science, business, or theology. In fact, positive irrational
beliefs have also been proven to enhance a person’s sense of happiness, well-being, and lifetime satisfaction.
¹⁸
Positive thinking can help even people who are born with a genetic propensity toward unhappiness to build a better and more optimistic attitude toward life.
¹⁹

In a landmark study that put “positive psychology” on the map, a large group of adults, ranging in age from thirty-five to fifty-four, were asked to write down, each night, three things that went well for them that day, and to provide a brief explanation why. Over the next three months, their degrees of happiness continued to increase,
and their feelings of depression continued to decrease,
even though they had discontinued the writing experiment.
²⁰
Thus by using language to help us reflect on positive ideas and emotions, we can enhance our overall well-being and improve the functioning of our brain.

Positive words and thoughts propel the motivational centers of the brain into action,
²¹
and they help us build up resilience when we are faced with the myriad problems of life.
²²
According to Sonja Lyubomirsky, one of the world’s leading researchers on happiness, if you want to develop lifelong satisfaction, you should regularly engage in positive thinking about yourself, share your happiest events with others, and savor every positive experience in your life. If you use language—your inner dialogues, your conversations with others, your words, your speech—to engage in optimism and positivity, you will find yourself moving in a more life-enhancing direction.

Can positive thinking be taken too far? Yes, especially if you engage in exaggeration. People may begin to distrust you because the overuse of extremely positive words in speech or writing can be read as a signal that you are being deceptive.
²³
This happens quite often in business communication and advertising, and it isn’t that the public has become more savvy. It’s a natural function of your brain, which is specifically designed to look for dishonesty in a person’s face or tone of voice. The solution to this communication problem is to be positive but honest. You don’t have to oversell yourself, because if you truly believe in the product or service you are offering—if your words
feel
genuine to you—other people will intuit your authenticity from the nonverbal communication cues you give out.

Here are some examples of words that turn prospective friends and customers off: “amazing,” “excellent,” “fabulous,” “fantastic,” “incredible,” “marvelous,” “great,” “phenomenal,” “splendid,” and “wonderful.” Ironically, extremely negative words, especially if directed toward an opponent, appear to give the speaker more
credibility in the eyes of the listener by casting doubt on the other person. It’s just another example of the power of no.

People can become immune to the overuse of strongly positive or negative words.
²⁴
Their awareness and sensitivity decreases, which may explain why chronic complainers are often unaware of their negativity and the emotional damage they are causing.

Words Can Change Your Genes

As mentioned earlier, certain positive words can, if focused on for ten or twenty minutes per day, influence genetic expression in your brain. In a recent study, Herbert Benson’s team at Massachusetts General Hospital discovered that the repetition of personally meaningful words can actually turn on stress-reducing genes.
²⁵
But you have to remain in a deeply relaxed state. To help subjects achieve this state, they were taught to use Benson’s “relaxation response.” It’s very easy to do, and we’ve described a variation of it in the accompanying sidebar.

Turn on Your Genes, Turn off Your Stress

Sit in a comfortable chair and close your eyes. Take ten deep breaths as you relax every muscle in your body. Now repeat to yourself, silently or aloud, a word or short phrase that gives you a feeling of serenity, peacefulness, or joy. Continue for ten to twenty minutes as you slowly breathe through your nose. Whenever a distracting thought or feeling intrudes, notice it without judgment and let it float away as you return to the repetition of your word. When you finish, open your eyes and notice how you feel. After a few weeks of practice, you’ll feel more relaxed and alert, less anxious and depressed. You may even find that you lose some of your desire to smoke, drink, or overeat.

Even novices who had never practiced any form of meditation or relaxation strategy were able to alter their genetic expression in eight weeks. Subjects were each given a twenty-minute CD that guided them through exercises involving diaphragmatic breathing, a “body scan” that involves consciously bringing attention to areas of tension in the body, and the repetition of a single word or phrase that generates a sense of peacefulness and well-being. The researchers suggested that similar practices, including various forms of meditation, repetitive prayer, yoga, tai chi, breathing exercises, progressive muscle relaxation, biofeedback, and guided imagery would have similar effects on our genes. And as you will see in
chapter 9
, our Compassionate Communication training exercise includes a similar relaxation exercise.

How about negative words? There is mounting evidence that strongly negative terms can interrupt the normal expression of genes that regulate one of the most important language centers of the brain, Wernicke’s area.
²⁶
This is where we learn how to interpret the meaning of words. Hostile language also appears to disrupt specific genes that are instrumental in the production of neurochemicals that protect us from physiological stress, and if we are exposed to it during childhood, it can undermine our ability to fend off anxiety, depression, and fear. Hearing hostile language has also been shown to lead to negative ruminations, which can likewise damage our brain.

Can Subliminal Words Influence Behavior?

New research demonstrates that subliminal messages can unconsciously influence our thoughts, feelings, and actions. For example, words and phrases repeated at a volume that we can barely perceive can create subtle changes in mood.
²⁷
Negative words stimulate anxiety, and positive words can lower it.
²⁸
But again the studies consistently show that the brain gives more attention to negative words, even when we are not aware that we’ve heard them.
²⁹
This reinforces our argument that even the subtlest forms of negativity can sour a relationship. We may murmur a complaint under our breath, but our voice and face will give us away.

On the positive side, subliminal messages can be used to motivate us to do better work.
³⁰
And in personal relationships, subliminal erotic words can trigger intimacy-related thoughts. That should come as no surprise. What is surprising is that erotic words appear to improve a person’s conflict-resolution strategies!
³¹
In fact, just hearing a beloved’s name, even if we are unconscious of it, will stimulate the circuits related to passion, whereas hearing a friend’s name will not.
³²

This has powerful ramifications for intimate relationships, because it tells us how important it is to communicate our feelings of love as often as we possibly can. Unfortunately, we often fall into the habit of taking our loved ones for granted, and thus we tend to speak up only when something bothers us.

But subliminal words are not as effective as persuasive messages that are clearly spoken or written. At the University of California, Los Angeles, researchers put subjects in an fMRI scanner and had them read and listen to messages encouraging the use of sunscreen. The more they were exposed to the messages, the more the subjects used sunscreen in the following week, even though there was no encouragement from the researchers to do so.
³³
The authors of this study replicated their findings with smokers: all the participants reduced the number of cigarettes they smoked over the next month, and those with the greatest increase in brain activity demonstrated the greatest decline in smoking.
³⁴

Transforming Reality

By holding a positive and optimistic thought in your mind, you stimulate frontal lobe activity. This area includes specific language centers that connect directly to the motor cortex responsible for moving you into action.
³⁵
And as our research has shown, the longer you concentrate on positive words, the more you begin to affect other areas of the brain. Functions in the parietal lobe start to change, which changes your perception of yourself and the people you interact with. A positive view of yourself will bias you toward seeing the good in others, whereas a negative self-image will incline you toward suspicion and doubt. Over time the structure of your thalamus will also change in response to your conscious words, thoughts, and feelings, and we believe that the thalamic changes affect the way in which you perceive reality.

Let me give you an example. If you repetitiously focus on the word “peace,” saying it aloud or silently, you will begin to experience a sense of peacefulness in yourself and in others. The thalamus will respond to this incoming message of peace, and it will relay the information to the rest of the brain. Pleasure chemicals like dopamine will be released, the reward system of your brain will be stimulated, anxieties and doubts will fade away, and your entire body will relax. And if you do these practices consistently over a period of time, your sense of compassion will grow. In fact, some of the most recent studies show that this kind of exercise will increase the thickness of your neocortex and shrink the size of your amygdala, the fight-or-flight mechanism in your brain.

Our own brain-scan research shows that concentrating and meditating on positive thoughts, feelings, and outcomes can be more powerful than any drug in the world, especially when it comes to changing old habits, behaviors, and beliefs. And to the best of our knowledge, the entire process is driven by the language-based processes of the brain.

By changing the way you use language, you change your consciousness, and that, in turn, influences every thought, feeling, and behavior in your life. Over time you may even begin to ameliorate limiting and disturbing memories by talking about them in a relaxed and positive way. When you do this, the old memory is changed and filed away in a slightly different way.
³⁶
The next time it’s recalled, it incorporates some of the new positive language that you encoded it with.

Positive refocusing, positive affirmations, acceptance-based awareness exercises, relaxation, hypnosis, and meditation have all been shown to be effective in interrupting negative ruminations and depressive thoughts,
³⁷
so why not include them in your daily routines? By changing your inner language, you can transform the reality in which you live.

Preventing Ruminations

To undermine negative ruminations, Robert Leahy, a clinical professor of psychology at Weill-Cornell Medical School, recommends that you try the following:

1. Ask yourself if your negative thinking has ever helped you in the past. Usually the answer is no.

2. Write down your negative thoughts, and then put the sheet of paper aside. When you look at it later, the problem won’t seem as large.

3. Ask yourself if the problem is real or imaginary. Is it part of the present or part of the past? Accept the past and let it go.

4. Instead of focusing on your problem, focus on an immediate goal that you can accomplish.

5. Accept that many problems are unpleasant, difficult, and unfair and that some of them simply can’t be solved.

6. Take a break and focus on doing something enjoyable.

The human brain is incredibly creative, and it dreams up positive and negative scenarios all day long. But most of us aren’t aware of these forms of mental chatter. And even when you discover them, or point them out in someone else’s behavior, they can go on repeating themselves like a well-worn groove in a record. Why? Because repetitious patterns of thinking form strong neural pathways that are highly resistant to change. That’s why we have to continually impose new styles of thinking, speaking, and listening to get new neural circuits to form.

That’s the power of imagination: it can trap us in a downward spiral of negative thoughts, or we can use it to change decades of habituated behaviors that no longer serve us well.

Minding Our Words

The first step is to recognize that we have all kinds of negative thoughts flowing unconsciously through our mind. Then all we have to do is turn our awareness inward and pay close attention to the processes of the busy brain. We don’t have to do anything with what we see or hear; we simply observe, without judging them, the moment-to-moment changes in our thoughts and feelings and sensations. This is the formal definition of mindfulness, and it is a very important tool when it comes to changing the way we think and feel.