The Details Are Important

I've recently finished the very inspiring and ultra-science-nerdy book "How Emotions Are Made" by Lisa Feldman Barrett (you may have seen her Ted talk or heard her recently on the podcast circuit). Her research on emotions is revolutionizing what we understand about ourselves, and the results offer a lot of hope for those of us who desire to better understand and work with our feelings.

And yes, this directly applies to pain as well!! Pain, after all, is a feeling.

As a direct result of reading this book, I've added to or refined some of the mindfulness practices I have my clients do, now guiding folks into what I've been calling a "granularity" practice.

The gist is this:  As part of a mindfulness or Somatic Tracking practice, when noticing the details of a sensation or experience, really slow down your process and capture the nuance and detail of what's happening in the moment. Take your time to let it fill out in all its intricacy so you can understand the different layers of information available in your system as they unfold. Go slow, be patient.

This is a classic element of mindful exploration in Hakomi Mindful Somatic Psychology that I've known and worked with for years, but now I know the really groovy neuroscience underneath what's happening when you do this, and why this type of practice is important and impactful, especially for those in pain.

When you slow down in mindfulness and get into the granular details of your experience, the activity of two important neural networks shifts significantly.

The first is what Barrett refers to as "the interoceptive network's body-budgeting regions." Interoceptive networks are how you know what things feel like inside your body, and they impact "body budget" by withdrawing glucose (energy) or adding cortisol (adrenaline) to your system to respond to a stressor.

In our granularity practice, these regions of the brain down-regulate, meaning that rather than deplete your energy, they come to rest, reducing glucose withdrawals and cortisol production in your system. Effectively, this is shifting from "fight or flight" to "rest and digest."

The second network impacted is known as a "control network," and serves as a conductor of the orchestra of sorts, acting as a high-level decision-maker in making sense of what you feel, predicting future events, deciding whether or not to respond to what you feel, and helping guide you toward desired outcomes. This is like the good manager you want on your team.

Here in the granularity practice, as the interoceptive networks come to rest a bit, the control networks up-regulate, or become more active. So as your fight or flight eases, higher level cognitive functioning comes online.

This isn't just a nice idea that's vague in its real-world impact. The positive benefit of this type of practice has been studied extensively.

In a 2012 study titled, "Feelings Into Words: Contributions of Language to Exposure Therapy" scientists studied groups of people with arachnophobia (fear of 🕷) and had them try three different ways to resolve their fear, including this granularity practice.

Barrett's offered a great, concise summary of the research in her book, so I'll leave this one to her:

"Fine-grained categorizations have been shown to beat two other popular approaches for 'regulating' emotions, in a study about fear of spiders. The first approach, called cognitive reappraisal, taught subjects to describe the spider in a nonthreatening way: 'Sitting in front of me is a little spider, and it's safe.' The second approach was distraction, having the subjects pay attention to something unrelated instead of the spider. The third was to categorize sensations with greater granularity, such as: 'In front of me is an ugly spider and it is disgusting, nerve-wracking, and yet, intriguing.' The third approach was the most effective in helping people with arachnophobia to be less anxious when observing a spider and to actually approach spiders. The effects lasted a week beyond the experiment, too."

Important stuff! Especially when we're in physical or emotional pain! 

Pain is the nervous system's danger signal. So pain & fear act together in our systems -- when fear amplifies, so does pain.

Practices such as this granularity exploration directly shift your neural networks, reducing fear and fight or flight tendencies, and can shift your nervous system's pain signaling in the direction of relief.

Try it for yourself. Be patient with it. And enjoy learning about the details!