I LOVE A METAPHOR! They're some of the best ways for us to convey meaning and embody understanding without a lot of confusion. Enter my own Drama Club vs. Debate Club as a way to help our mindbody navigate the metabolically taxing and cognitive overload of uncertainty. We all have survival strategies, habituated ways of relating to our internal and external sensory world. Our brain has a meaning making mandate which it pursues through the nervous system and cognition to understand the world around it, after all it's encased in a skull, and senses are storytellers of sensemaking. So I've developed a simple and hopefully fun construct of drama club vs. debate club to help you step outside of the endless suffering of overthinking and sensory + emotional avoidance, as well as how to use logic and cognition to help you decrease the stress response that comes with uncertainty, confusion and fear. If we learn to know and love our meta cognitive strategies we can create a welcome foundation for change. Enjoy!
I LOVE A METAPHOR!
They're some of the best ways for us to convey meaning and embody understanding without a lot of confusion.
Enter my own Drama Club vs. Debate Club as a way to help our mindbody navigate the metabolically taxing and cognitive overload of uncertainty.
We all have survival strategies, habituated ways of relating to our internal and external sensory world. Our brain has a meaning making mandate which it pursues through the nervous system and cognition to understand the world around it, after all it's encased in a skull, and senses are storytellers of sensemaking.
So I've developed a simple and hopefully fun construct of drama club vs. debate club to help you step outside of the endless suffering of overthinking and sensory + emotional avoidance, as well as how to use logic and cognition to help you decrease the stress response that comes with uncertainty, confusion and fear.
If we learn to know and love our meta cognitive strategies we can create a welcome foundation for change. Enjoy!
Articles about The Neural Story Net and the Meaning Making Mandate in our brains.
https://mediax.stanford.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/Haven.pdf
https://storyhow.com/blog/why-you-need-to-know-about-the-neural-story-net/
Uncertainty + The Mind
https://nesslabs.com/uncertain-mind
Uncertainty and stress: Why it causes diseases and how it is mastered by the brain.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0301008217300369
Articles about Interoception:
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/aug/15/the-hidden-sense-shaping-your-wellbeing-interoception
Interoception and Emotion
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28950976/
[00:00:00] Welcome to the curiosity cure podcast. I'm your host, Deb Malkin, master certified life coach, body worker, hypnotist trained in pain reprocessing by the pain psychology center, queer elder fat human on planet earth here to help you evoke the power of simple neuroplasticity techniques rooted in shame, free curiosity.
[00:00:29] So you can feel more better. More of the time in the body you have today and build the rich, full life that you want to live. A quick disclaimer. This podcast is not a replacement for medical care. I am here to provide insights and techniques that can compliment your healthcare journey, but always consult with your healthcare provider for personalized advice.
[00:00:58] Hello, and welcome to the Curiosity Cure. Today's podcast is going to be something I call Drama Club versus Debate Club or Debate Club versus Drama Club. And obviously it's funny. It's meant to be funny. It's meant to be memorable. Hopefully, in moments of crisis, a flare, a reaction to a trigger, a moment of uncertainty, you will be able to check in with yourself, your body and your mind and be like, where am I going?
[00:01:40] Just imagine that you're in high school and you're walking down the hallway and you're going to your extracurricular activity. Are you going to a drama club or are you going to debate club? And they have different conceptualizations. They have different roles. And sometimes it's useful to take yourself out of one and put yourself in the other.
[00:02:04] This is not about a hierarchy. One is not better than the other. It's just the idea that they have different functions physiologically. Now this is a metaphor, so just roll with me. We're going to use our imagination.
[00:02:20] We've all had that sense of arguing with ourselves. Right? That we are having a conversation and almost that we are having both sides of the conversation. We're just arguing back and forth, meaning both parts of us or all different parts of us, we're each making our best case for whatever it is that we are trying to figure out.
[00:02:49] Whether it's what is this sensation? Why do I have this headache? Why am I in this mood? What was that conversation? In debate club, this is where we argue the facts. Okay, what happens in debate club? I've never been in a debate club, an article from Patton junior high, debate club description. Students learn to create factual, logical, ethical, and emotional arguments to persuade others in the club that their side is correct. There's a formal debate format. When we're in debate club in our own mind and body, I would say a formal debate format is just like what we've done in the past. Obviously, it's not set to a certain explicit defined set of rules, but maybe if you've actually participated in debate club, they might be similar.
[00:03:48] You know what that is, that feeling when you're having that kind of argument in your mind. That factual, logical, ethical, and emotional arguments about persuading. So whether that's, should I go on this walk? Is that going to give me a headache?
[00:04:09] Is that going to make me tired? What is happening in my body? Oh, I'm noticing I'm having a feeling. Why am I having this feeling? Am I allowed to have this feeling? You know, and we can just notice themes coming up when we can step outside of debate club.
[00:04:28] Maybe we want to imagine that we are the teacher, noticing themes, sensing arguments, sensing logical fallacies, not to give ourselves a grade, but just to have that sense of a curious observer outside of this debate club to start to notice how do we construct these arguments?
[00:04:54] One of my theories is that we go to debate club, we go to this cognitive experience because we are unfamiliar or unwilling or afraid or it's a habit, but that there's some kind of emotional experience that we are avoiding, consciously or subconsciously avoiding.
[00:05:21] And that's where drama club comes in. So drama club, do I need a description for drama club? There's lots of different activities that happen in drama club. There's improvisation, there's theater games, there's a rolling on the floor and making sounds. There's this sense of getting to know your body as an instrument.
[00:05:45] In drama club, there is both the explicit and implicit invitation to feel without necessarily judgment and editing. Now certainly if you've ever been in drama club, there's plenty of judgment. But when we're doing stuff to try it, then you know, the goal is not judging. The goal is experiencing.
[00:06:17] The problem with doing debate club in your own mind is that we can actually debate anything. We have evidence for almost any outcome because it's either things that we have seen or experienced in our own life or witnessed in somebody else's life. And this touches on this idea of predictive processing, because that is what the brain is doing. It is giving a simulation based on the past. Anything we've seen and experienced in our lives or other people's lives, and then we extrapolate and create logic of how that applies to ourself.
[00:06:59] Say you have a toothache, your mind might go to you your aunt Carol, who had a toothache that turned into an abscess that meant that she had to have jaw reconstruction. And that is now a concept in your mind when you are thinking about your own toothache. What you may or may not be thinking about is all the other toothaches that are not leading to jaw reconstruction, right?
[00:07:33] So some of this is, what are the habits of your mind? Where is your attention going? What are the stories and the concepts that we are prioritizing in our brain when we are having a physiological experience? We can extrapolate logic to the nth degree and create this sense of deep cognitive knowing.
[00:07:56] But we're really just having a debate with ourselves until you actually go and get information. And so if you catch yourself in that cycle, because it's a cycle, but it's a strategy, like I mentioned. There are strategies for taking ourselves through fear, and that can be very useful to motivate to action, because we have the experience of Aunt Carol, that might help us prioritize going to the dentist, because if we only believe that tooth pain was insignificant and didn't have any, meaning or impact on your life, then you wouldn't have a drive to go to the dentist.
[00:08:46] And then maybe it is something important, right? So one is starting to understand and learn the role of debate club in our strategy. There's some part of it that is very useful and that's amazing. We want to keep that part. The part that then might not be helpful is deciding that what happened to Aunt Carol is happening to you or worse, right?
[00:09:20] So you're living in this catastrophizing future. A lot of times people are afraid of going to the dentist and that fear is somaticized, it is felt in the body and then what we try to do is argue with ourselves or try not to feel the feeling that we are currently feeling.
[00:09:44] So I was listening to a course about the neuroscience of storytelling, and we all have this area of our brain called a neural story net, three words, neural story net part of the brain. And that part of the brain drives what they call the make sense mandate. And I'll link to this research.
[00:10:11] And there's a reason for that. I think we like things to make sense, it feels very secure. For our brain, it is very metabolically taxing to have uncertainty, which is why we have Concepts, why we have learning, right? If every time you went to sit on a chair, you didn't know what a chair was, you didn't know what sitting was, our brain does this on purpose. It categorizes things, it makes meaning and it helps us understand so that we are not doing this kind of in real time processing and learning.
[00:10:47] But how the brain reacts to uncertainty is very strong. Uncertainty, according to a study from the University of Wisconsin Madison, shows that uncertainty disrupts many of automatic cognitive processes that govern routine action. So to ensure our survival, we become hypervigilant to potential threats.
[00:11:12] And this heightened state of worry creates conflict in the brain. So first, uncertainty impacts our attention, a set of threat degrades our ability to focus. When we feel uncertain about the future, doubt takes over our mind, making it difficult to think about anything else. Are you getting what I'm going with this, debate club?
[00:11:35] Our mind is scattered and distracted. We feel like we're all over the place. Research in primates conducted by Dr Jacqueline Gottlieb and her team at Columbia University's Zuckerman Institute reveals that uncertainty leads to major shifts in the brain activity, both at the micro level of individual cells and the macro level of signals sent across the brain.
[00:12:00] Put simply, their results suggest that our brain redirects its energy towards resolving uncertainty at the expense of other cognitive tasks. This article says, in the words of Samueli Lato, a researcher at the University of Turku, uncertainty always increases cognitive load. Stressors, such as health threat, fear of unemployment, and fear of consumer market disruptions, all cause cognitive load. Cognitive overload makes it harder to keep crucial information in mind when making decisions or to think creatively by connecting ideas together.
[00:12:42] It says the good news is heavy load of uncertainty is not inevitable. Studies suggest that responding to uncertainty is resource intensive, but metacognitive strategies can help us reduce the impact of uncertainty. And this says by using thinking tools, we can offload some of the burden uncertainty puts on our mind. So we can regain control of our attention and free our working memory resources and ultimately think more clearly in times of uncertainty.
[00:13:13] I will say that we need to also add in emotions. We're not just thinking of thinking tools because here is the thing. When we are trying not to feel something, that is also incredibly resource intensive and impacts our working memory when we're trying not to feel something or experience something.
[00:13:42] And we can use the same kind of meta cognitive strategy to help us unburden uncertainty. When we do that by taking ourselves to drama club to experience emotion, to experience a sensation without trying to control it, organize it, understand it, stop it, start it when we're just in this space of curiosity in a metacognitive way all of that pressure, fear, all of that effort is diminished. That effort is offloaded.
[00:14:29] One of the things that I'm always trying to support here is that this idea of stress and management and how we contextualize things that are happening to us are not just psychological concepts, but they have very real impacts on our body.
[00:14:50] Here's one thing that is important to resolve uncertainty, three processes play a crucial role, attention, learning, and habituation. And if you've ever listened to my podcast, what do I talk a lot about attention, learning, and habituation?
[00:15:12] To continue on, when persons feel uncertain and threatened because of a changing internal or external environment, their brains enter a hypervigilant status to decrease uncertainty as fast as possible.
[00:15:28] To garner the required information, extra cerebral energy is needed from the physical point of view, with respect to the brain this means reducing uncertainty and providing the brain with extra energy entails neuro endocrine and neuro energetic responses that constitute the stress response.
[00:15:48] What does this mean for us? The body has a stress response and it goes through this meaning making mandate. My work is always about what is useful for you. Cause I am not a researcher. I am here to help you apply concepts to create wanted change in your life.
[00:16:12] So if you notice yourself circling around and circling around and circling around in debate club and noticing that debate club is a strategy of yours, take yourself out of that classroom, move yourself down the hallway and go to drama club. And just be in the felt experience of what is happening now through that metacognitive lens.
[00:16:39] And that will help you decrease uncertainty because what you will experience In drama club is your ability to use interoception to sense what is happening in your body, right? So you can say, my feet are on the ground. I'm noticing the fluttering in my chest. The way that you would lean into a sensation with curiosity is different than just reacting to it. There is already inherently built into Drama Club this quality of exploration and play and wonder and uncertainty, except that You know what we know that we're in drama club. We know that we're in this room. We know that we're going to roll on the floor. We know a lot of things. So we can look around the room and orient ourselves to where we are when we're having an experience.
[00:17:47] Oftentimes when we're stuck in debate club, we're actually just kind of looping that neural narrative and we lose sense of our body. We lose sense of where we are in space and time and this present moment. So if we can pick ourselves up, walk ourselves to drama club and just be, or even play, that can be really useful.
[00:18:15] If we just find ourselves in drama club all the time, where we're just feeling and feeling and feeling, and it doesn't quite have an anchor point. If we're like acting like we're in the ocean and we're being swept away by what we're experiencing. Maybe we pick ourselves up from drama club and go to debate club a little bit and start to apply a little logic. Start to be like, what is happening? Start to break down the logic of like, well, this happened and then this happened and then this happened and then I felt this.
[00:18:56] And we can use a little bit of logic not to have an argument or win, but to provide ourselves a metacognitive experience that lifts us up and out of an unending emotional experience. These are concepts to play with. Some people are going to have, um, uh, proclivity or a preference for one versus the other.
[00:19:26] I'm sure that you can guess my preference. I don't just have a, email called musical Mondays for no reason. And we're going to have a podcast that goes even deeper into emotional valence, emotional processing and emotional granularity, because those are all very useful and important concepts when we understand emotions and sensations with more granularity.
[00:19:56] And granularity means having more words or concepts to define or experience something. That really helps us. Again, with this quality of uncertainty and the quality of uncertainty that increases our cognitive load and our stress cycle, right?
[00:20:15] So when you have a feeling or whatever, and you know its origin and where it's from and why you're having it, like there's a quality of distress that's not there, you may not love what is going on, but you're not confused.
[00:20:29] One of the things I. I think that all of this science is telling us is that confusion is very taxing. When I listen to this lecture about the meaning making mandate I was thinking in particular ways that my father's brain works really hard to make sense of the things that he's experiencing.
[00:20:52] And he has dementia and the conclusions that he comes to and are convinced of are very fascinating because they are really wrong, but he's 98 years old. The last time I was visiting with him, he explained to me very rationally that his parents were still alive. And I know that that is not true. I was there at their funerals. That would also make them 130, 140 years old, which seems very unlikely. I have tried in the past to explain things logically. And, you know, there is a point in which his meaning making mandate has put these concepts together and they are what makes sense to him. He doesn't have the capacity to take in more information or meaning. He doesn't really have the awareness to know like, Hey, maybe this stuff doesn't make sense. So he feels very convicted and convinced. And yeah, I've just learned that there's no exchange of logic, nothing that is going to convince him of something different because his brain is following that make sense mandate.
[00:22:07] And I have a make sense mandate. You know, we all do. And I feel that very strongly. It's very strongly experienced in my body and not always in the most pleasant way. When things happen and it doesn't make sense to me, I can have a very strong and quick visceral and physical response. So now I know and understand like this is how brains work. They're just going to try to make things make sense.
[00:22:43] Having some awareness of this make sense mandate helps you be able to step outside yourself and take a look at how you are connecting dots. Are you connecting dots that are actually not connecting? Are you in debate club, saying I'm going to make these dots connect and I'm going to give you the most logical argument. So what I like to do and suggest to people is that when you're feeling like you want to have that internal argument, when you want to have that internal struggle, or you notice that you're in the middle of it, the best thing to do is just drop it. Just notice that this is the schema that's happening. This is my brain's strategy.
[00:23:26] Maybe when we were young, maybe we had to make a case for our wants and our needs to our caregivers. Maybe you have a strong propensity to argue for your value, maybe in relationships or at work. Maybe we do that with ourselves. Maybe we've had to do that in society to prove that we have a right to exist.
[00:23:53] Because our brain's job is to keep us alive, and it will do it by whatever means necessary, is going to find the strategy that works best to keep you alive, and that makes sense, that follows the make sense mandate. What we're trying to do in pain neuroscience is to create a different make sense construct, things that we can draw understanding from in a different way.
[00:24:23] We can't just not do something like we can't be like, that's great, don't be in debate club. If you're in debate club, it's hard to just stop. You've got to bring yourself someplace else. And if you could walk down the hall and loosen your tie, take off your blazer, mess up your hair, pull your shirt out of your pants if you tucked it in, you know, or you could take out one side or pop a collar and you go to drama club.
[00:24:59] And in drama club, we make sense. But we make sense differently. In Drama Club, we allow feelings. We practice different feelings. We try them on with different characters, different moods, different concepts. We're playing a role or we're just improvising. We might be practicing something like high arousal or funny or anger.
[00:25:30] We might be practicing sadness or even despair. But because it has this quality of being welcomed, and we can bring this curiosity to it, we can be like, Oh, what does that despair feel like for this character? And the character just so happens to be you. So what does that feel like for you in this moment? Can you get so curious that the part of you that would have been afraid is now just interested Or fascinated.
[00:26:07] One rule of drama club is that feelings are movement. They move through us. They're not fixed. They don't stay. They always change. If you've ever been an actor and you've done a play more than once, you're not just doing the same performance over and over again. We can have a sense of fluidity with what we're experiencing.
[00:26:38] We have our auditory senses and our visual senses and our kinesthetic senses, which are the way things feel. We can modulate our attention to be able to go between our senses. There's the way that something feels on the outside. There's the way that something feels on the inside. There's olfactory and gustatory, how things taste, how things smell, and they all have a sense of movement to it and a tempo and a pressure and a color.
[00:27:17] And when we get playful and curious and interested in observing these experiences, Then we know that's where we go when we're stuck in debate club. And I'm not dissing debate club. Debate club is great. But you're never going to debate yourself into feeling calm or safe. And Hey, I'm willing to be wrong about that, but I have mostly seen people debate themselves into a kind of spiral and a panic.
[00:27:52] My beautiful logic people, I love you and you're so brilliant and you're so smart and this make sense mandate in you loves that sense of coherence and surety. Let's just add in this neuroscience lens to help us step back and see our strategies, see what we're doing, what meaning we are making of a thing so that then we can step in with our metacognition, shift that strategy, change that mandate, and allow the body to soften, relax, find safety, curiosity, and even find delight. Even in things that we call negative emotions. But I guarantee you, if we did not love ourselves some longing or heartbreak or despair, we would not have music, we would not have movies, we would not have drama.
[00:28:48] And we also would not have comedy. We wouldn't have these things. Human beings are meant to feel. And so when we are feeling afraid of feeling, it's usually because we think that feeling is fixed and it will never change. Or we believe that that feeling means something about us, means something about who we are or our future.
[00:29:19] So if you only learn one thing, Feelings are not fixed. Feelings are not fixed. They flow. Feelings flow. They may come back, but then they flow. It is the ebb and the flow. And when we learn new things, we add that to our meaning making. We add that to our sense of what we understand about the world.
[00:29:46] And just like my previous week's, podcast about autogenic training, we can learn how to develop that deep sense of relaxation and warmth that creates these lovely physiological changes in our bodies that nourishes our nervous system. It teaches our brain that we are safe, that helps remind us that we are not what is happening to us, that we have power, that we have agency, that we have the ability to make change.
[00:30:17] I hope this concept of debate club and drama club, um, one makes you laugh, but two gives you tools that you can use. I love helping people feel empowered. So what I do in my sessions is this work and more, sometimes what we do is find those deeper threads that we pull that are individual to you, your individual strategies, your individual fears, your individual joys, and your individual pleasures.
[00:30:46] Then we can start to reorganize your habituated neural pathways so that you can feel more joy and more pleasure, feel more relaxation and ease. Can help you use that metacognition to make sense that teaches your brain that it's not stuck in a confusion of uncertainty. It helps you attend to stressful things in your life.
[00:31:13] Sometimes it's about learning how to make decisions. Sometimes it's being willing to explore the worst case scenario and when you turn around and look at the thing that you are most afraid of, you are attending to the fear and you are teaching your brain that maybe not that there's nothing to be afraid of, but that the things you are afraid of, you can create solutions for. And that is the work that I love to do with my clients.
[00:31:44] Hop on a curiosity call with me. I would love to teach you how to apply this knowledge about the brain to help you feel certain about where to go, what to do, what steps to take, how to attend to the sensations in your body. Let me know like drama club, debate club, which one is your jam and what is it like to try on the other one?