The One Brain Change that Changes Everything

Years ago I took a two weekend training that had many neurobiologically integrative elements to it. One was a requirement that: “When you give your word, keep it.” That made sense to me, even though I was someone pretty lax in that regard. I didn’t know much about the brain then, or interpersonal neurobiology – how we constantly, consciously and unconsciously affect one another for better or worse.

During the course of that training people repeatedly made promises and then failed to keep them. They promised to arrive on time and they would show up late. They promised to pay attention to the trainer and then repeatedly whispered things to their neighbor. They promised to participate in the exercises and then came up with all kinds of stories about why they couldn’t, shouldn’t, or wouldn’t. It was interesting to notice how, with each of these broken promises, my automatic instinct was to move away from those people. Without me even consciously directing it, my brain and body automatically identified people who made promises and didn’t keep them as “untrustworthy others.”

A great many of us fail to realize that much of our lives is actively devoted to safety-seeking. From the friends we make, to the places we work, the stores where we shop, to the restaurants where we eat most regularly, ideally they all actively operate in ways that consciously or unconsciously avoid triggering our threat detection circuitry. Once a threat-detection circuit gets activated, it’s difficult to disconnect it and turn it off. I’m pretty sure that’s one of the reasons this long-ago training spent so much time working with us on keeping our word once we’ve given it. It makes us dependable, trustworthy, i.e. worthy of other people’s trust. Keeping our word actually turns out to be a lot easier to do than the repair work required after promises have been broken. Unfortunately the work of repairing the rupture that results from unkept promises is something many of us simply never bother to do. This is a mistake.

Interconnected Hydrology

My friend Susan recently sent me the image below from The Nature Conservancy. I was struck by how very much like brain networks all the water basins in the country appear. Not only that, but how connected they all are.

It’s hard for me not to think of human beings as being interconnected like that. And equally difficult to think that it doesn’t matter when broken promises break connections. Life and energy (and water) is meant to flow. When it doesn’t, this image makes it easy to imagine that serious consequences result.

Say What You’ll Do and Do What You Say

What also comes to mind in terms of keeping our promises is how instructive many wisdom traditions are when it comes to using language. Buddhism, for example, offers the concept of Right Speech, most easily memorable as mindful inquiry by the acronym THINK: Is what we’re saying True? Is it Helpful? Is it Inspiring? Is it Necessary? And finally, and probably most important from a brain-health perspective, Is it Kind? Imagine how trustworthy the world would be if we all walked around with this way of behaving as a personal adrenal management practice?

Circling Averages

Motivational speaker Jim Rohn popularized the notion that we (our brains and bodies) are the average of the five people we spend the most time with. That fits with the tenets of Interpersonal Neurobiology. In my own early life in the housing projects, it quickly became apparent to me that I didn’t really want to spend a lot of time around people who scared me or whom I couldn’t trust. But where to go and what to do to find new people to raise the quality of my social circle?

Growing up, a single mom with four boys – a woman named Edith Labovitz – used to live in the projects. She was instrumental in getting me my first job – delivering newspapers around the neighborhood. One day she just picked up and successfully moved with her four boys from New Haven to Los Angeles. Years later, I would make the same move, and because she was kind and gracious enough to take me in as Son #5 when I arrived in LA, the downward trajectory my life had been on, suddenly changed abruptly. Her only requirement of me: keep every promise I made her. I owe her and her sons a deep debt of gratitude for substantially changing my brain and my behavior at a most vulnerable and critical time in my life.

If you want to powerfully amp up the change process in your own brain and behavior, check out this Enchanted Loom review of the new book, Behave: The biology of humans at our best and worst, by Stanford neurobiologist, and Daily Show guest, Robert Sapolsky. It’s been ten years in the making.