It’s all in the filing cabinet
What we think is what creates our experience. It’s behind the sense we make of our lives, the actions that we take, and the experience we have of being human.
It is very tempting, and indeed popular to believe that our experience of life is outside our control and determined by the events that happen to us over the years. It’s convenient to say that we are the recipients of an experience rather than the creators of it because, if that were true, it would absolve us of any responsibility for what happens next. We can just shrug our shoulders, sigh and blame whoever we feel should be responsible for what happens.
The thing is that it’s not life events that determine what we make of our existence and whether we are happy or dissatisfied with our lot. It’s what we think about the events in our lives that defines whether our cup is half full, half empty or overflowing. Money doesn’t make us happy and adversity doesn’t make us depressed, it’s the meaning we apply to our situation that makes the difference.
There are people who seemingly have everything and yet are depressed or despairing, and there are people who have experienced traumatic, life changing events who are happy and positive. So, if this is the case, and there are too many examples that indicate that it is to list them all here, why would that be? What would cause people to smile in the face of adversity and to sigh in the presence of abundance? Two things: First there’s habit, and then there’s choice.
Habit is what powers our everyday lives. Yes, I know we like to thing that we are all very logical and rational, but if it wasn’t for habit we wouldn’t have the brain space to achieve much more than getting up and remembering who we are every morning let alone all the other amazing things we achieve. We rely on a very old part of our brain, that developed long before the analytical abilities that we pride ourselves on, to get us through the day so that the newer more conscious part of our brain can focus on higher things (or not, as the case may be). It takes care of so much for us; walking, driving, writing, cleaning our teeth. The list is endless. It does everything that we have learned to do well enough that we don’t have to think about it, including the task of holding on to what we believe to be true. And this is roughly how it works:
Imagine for a moment that your brain is like a 3-drawer filing cabinet with one of those wire in-trays sitting on the top. The in-tray is where we do our conscious thinking. It’s the way of thinking to which we assign the highest rank and yet it is perhaps the more limited of our abilities. It has a limited capacity and we can only hold around seven pieces of information in there at any one time. Despite this limited space, what we tend to keep in there are those things that we are worrying about from the past or anxious about for the future. We leave ourselves little space for processing what is going on in there here and now, and we rely heavily on the more automatic processes that run in the three drawers below.
The bottom drawer is the oldest part of the human brain and its sole function is to keep you alive. It regulates and preserves your body. It manages your temperature, heartbeat and digestion. It triggers the healing process when you are sick or injured and manages all the chemical reactions that enable us to run or fight in the face of danger when our fight or flight response kicks in. It does this all automatically in response to triggers from the environment and from elsewhere in our brain. You don’t have to think about any of it consciously.
The bottom drawer also takes care of all the things that we have learned to do so well that we can do them without thinking. Walking, cleaning our teeth, even driving the car. How often have you been driving and then suddenly realised you can’t remember the last five minutes of your journey? All this and more can be done on autopilot once we have learned the routine for doing them. We may be aware of the decision to start these activities, but we don’t have to think about how. We just do it. The bottom drawer will just repeat the same patterns again and again until we consciously teach it something new.
The middle drawer is also primarily concerned with keeping us safe both physically, by alerting the bottom drawer to potential threats, and by keeping us aligned to our tribe. The processing abilities of the middle developed as humans began to form groups that were larger than the basic family unit. It manages and maintains our perceptions, our emotions beliefs and values and, just like the bottom drawer will repeat patterns of behaviour and responses once they have been established. What goes on in the middle drawer is at the same time one of our greatest advantages as it allows us to do so much so quickly when we run on autopilot. It is also what is giving us so much trouble as we contend with the challenges of 21st century living because it was designed for tribes of up to a hundred and fifty people. It has no mechanism for dealing with global tribes of thousands or more, and is one of the reasons that many of us feel disconnected or overwhelmed.
The top drawer is the place of analysis and creativity. It is more rational and logical than the bottom or middles drawers but still primarily runs unconscious processes. It’s where we do our problem solving and innovating and you don’t have to look far to see some of the amazing creations that have been possible courtesy of this part of our brain. That said, it is slower to respond than the middle or bottom drawers and although it is brilliant in non-threatening situations it is quickly bypassed by the fast processing in the middle and bottom drawers if we are physically or emotionally challenged.
With all three drawers and the in-tray doing what they do; we create an experience of the events of our lives like this:
Information from the event gets into our brain through our five senses of sight, smell, feeling, taste and touch. There is far too much information for us to process all of it so the middle drawer filters it based on what we have experienced before. It then presents us with the nearest similar experience from the past to model our behaviour on. It doesn’t have to make sense it just has to be similar and explains why we can find ourselves with a sudden and irrational dislike for a person we have just met. If something about them is even slightly similar to a person we have had a negative experience of in the past, our middle drawer tells us to feel and behave like we did the last time. And so, we do. This process goes on all the time. “What is this experience like? What did I feel say or do last time? OK, do it again”. So, our experience becomes habitual and how we experience life today is shaped by how we experienced it yesterday. That is of course until we know that’s what we are doing.
When we are aware that this is how our mind works and how we create our own experience we can, if we choose, interrupt the pattern, break the habit and install new meaning. And of course, if we don’t want to create a new meaning, that’s also a choice. That’s not to say it’s always easy to do because the old automatic patterns are faster to start running than something new that we are just beginning to learn. Nevertheless, it is still up to us to decide whether it’s worth the effort to create new meaning and new behaviour or to stay with what we have unconsciously created for ourselves so far.
A habit is only a habit until you are aware of it, and then it’s a choice.
