Four Ways to Click: Rewire Your Brain for Stronger, More Rewarding Relationships

210 Pages·2015·4.35 MB·English

by  Amy Banks

JEREMY P. TARCHER/PENGUIN
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Banks, Amy Elizabeth.
Four ways to click : rewire your brain for stronger, more rewarding relationships / Amy Banks, M.D., with Leigh Ann Hirschman.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-69815423-0
1. Interpersonal relations. 2. Social psychology. 3. Brain. I. Hirschman, Leigh Ann. II. Title.
HM1106.B366 2015 2014035233
302—dc23
Version_1
To
Jayme and Alex
for the love and joy that fuel my life
CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Foreword by Daniel J. Siegel, M.D.
CHAPTER 1.
Boundaries Are Overrated: A New Way of Looking at Relationships
CHAPTER 2.
The Four Neural Pathways for Healthy Relationships
CHAPTER 3.
The Three Rules of Brain Change
CHAPTER 4.
The C.A.R.E. Relational Assessment
CHAPTER 5.
C Is for Calm: Make Your Smart Vagus Smarter
CHAPTER 6.
A Is for Accepted: Soothe the Dorsal Anterior Cingulate Cortex
CHAPTER 7.
R Is for Resonant: Strengthen Your Brain’s Mirroring System
CHAPTER 8.
E Is for Energetic: Reconnect Your Dopamine Reward System to Healthy Relationships
CHAPTER 9.
Maintain Your Brain
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
FOREWORD
Want to have more joy and contentment in your life? All the scientific studies of
happiness, longevity, and mental and medical health point to one factor: the
strength of your relationships with others. In Four Ways to Click, psychiatrist
Amy Banks, M.D., provides an innovative and user-friendly summary of the
extensive research on the neuroscience of relationships and offers readers
practical ways to use this knowledge to retrain their brains for healthier, more
rewarding relationships. What’s in this for you? Simply put, you can
intentionally transform your life by improving how you connect with others.
Relationships are not simply the “icing on the cake” for a life well lived.
Relationships are the cake.
After decades of studying how culture shapes our relationships as well as
working as a psychiatrist in clinical practice, Amy Banks has brilliantly created
what she calls the C.A.R.E. system, which can help improve the four ways we
“click” with one another: how calm we feel around others, are accepted by
others, resonate with the inner states of others, and are energized by these
connections. Using the C.A.R.E. system as it is described in this book, readers
can target the neural pathways that need fine-tuning so that the quality of their
relationships increases. With an understanding of how our brains truly work we
can intentionally change how we live our lives!
I love this book! It is beautifully written, engaging, and inspiring.
Want more happiness? Want to live longer? Want to be healthier in mind and
body? Then learning these four ways to click into more meaningful and
rewarding relationships is your passport to achieving these goals. Let Amy
Banks be your guide to a better life of love and laughter. Enjoy!
—DANIEL J. SIEGEL, M.D.
Chapter 1
BOUNDARIES ARE OVERRATED
A New Way of Looking at Relationships
B
oundaries are overrated.
If you want healthier, more mature relationships; if you want to stop
repeating old patterns that cause you pain; if you are tired of feeling emotionally
disconnected from the people you spend your time with; if you want to grow
your inner life, you can begin by questioning the idea that there is a clear, crisp
line between you and the people you interact with most frequently.
People who talk a lot about boundaries tend to make statements like these:
“It shouldn’t matter what other people do and say to you, not if you have a
strong sense of self.”
“How do parents know they’ve been successful? When their children no
longer need them.”
“Best friends and true romance are for the young. As you get older, you
naturally grow apart from other people.”
“You shouldn’t need other people to complete you.”
“You wouldn’t have so many problems if you would just stand on your own
two feet.”
The message is clear: it’s not “healthy” to need other people—and whatever
you do, don’t let yourself be infected by other peoples’ feelings, thoughts, and
emotions. The statements above are intended to have an emotional effect on you.
You may notice that they sound just a teensy bit judgmental and shaming. I know
they make me uncomfortable; when I read them, I feel like I’m standing in a
harsh white spotlight with someone pointing a finger at me, intoning You’re
pretty messed up, missy, and it’s all your fault.
The ideal of complete psychological independence is one that was very big
with mental health professionals in much of the twentieth century, and it still has
our culture by the throat. So even if those statements about boundaries carry a
sting, they also probably sound familiar to you, or even self-evident. Obvious!
So I couldn’t possibly be suggesting that they’re untrue. I couldn’t possibly
say that it can be good to be dependent, or that our mental health is unavoidably
affected by the people we share our lives with, or that we achieve emotional
growth when we are profoundly connected to others instead of when we are
apart from them.
That’s exactly what I’m saying.
This book is going to show you a different way of thinking about your
emotional needs and what it means to be a healthy, mature adult. A new field of
scientific study, one I call relational neuroscience, has shown us that there is
hardwiring throughout our brains and bodies designed to help us engage in
satisfying emotional connection with others. This hardwiring includes four
primary neural pathways that are featured in this book. Relational neuroscience
has also shown that when we are cut off from others, these neural pathways
suffer. The result is a neurological cascade that can result in chronic irritability
and anger, depression, addiction, and chronic physical illness. We are just not as
healthy when we try to stand on our own, and that’s because the human brain is
built to operate within a network of caring human relationships. How do we
reach our personal and professional potential? By being warmly, safely
connected to partners, friends, coworkers, and family. Only then do our neural
pathways get the stimulation they need to make our brains calmer, more tolerant,
more resonant, and more productive.
The good news for those of us whose relationships don’t always feel so warm
or safe: it is possible to heal and strengthen those four neural pathways that are
weakened when you don’t have strong connections. Relationships and your brain
form a virtuous circle, so by strengthening your neural pathways for connection,
you will also make it easier to build the healthy relationships that are essential
for your psychological and physical health.
For many people, the news about the importance of relationships began with
a 1998 study at the University of Parma in Italy, a study that proved how deeply
connected we are to one another, right down to our neurons.
Your Feelings, My Brain
It was one of those lucky scientific mistakes, an unexpected observation that
could have easily gone unnoticed if it hadn’t been for an astute researcher. When
Giacomo Rizzolatti, a neurophysicist at the University of Parma, and his
research team began their now-famous experiment, they were not intending to
explore how human beings interact. In fact, they were not even studying people.
The Italian researchers were mapping a small area, known as F5, in the brains of
the macaque monkey. At this point in neurological research, it was already well
known that the F5 neurons fire when a monkey reaches his arm and hand away
from his body to grasp an object.
One routine day in the lab, a researcher observed something unprecedented.
The researcher was standing in the line of sight of a monkey whose F5 cells had
been implanted with micro-sized electrodes. As the researcher reached out to
grasp an object, the electrodes placed on the monkey’s F5 area activated.
Remember: it was known that the F5 neurons activate when a monkey moves
his arm to grasp something.
Then think about this: the monkey was not moving his arm; he was simply
watching as the researcher’s arm moved.
This seemed impossible. At the time of this observation, scientists believed
that the nerve cells for action were separate and distinct from the nerve cells for
sensory observations. Sensory neurons picked up information from the outside
world; motor neurons were devoted to acting. So when the F5 area, known for its
link to physical action, lit up in the brain of a monkey who was only watching
action in someone else, it was a clear violation of this known divide. It was as if
the brain of the monkey and the brain of the researcher were somehow
synchronized. Even more unsettling, it was as if their brains overlapped, as if the
researcher’s physical movement existed inside the monkey.1
As Rizzolatti and other neuroscientists pursued this odd observation, they
found that human brains also demonstrate this mirroring effect. In other words,
you understand me by performing an act of internal mimicry—by letting some of
my actions and feelings into your head. Ask a friend to briskly rub her hands
together as you watch. Chances are that as her hands become warm from the
friction, your hands will start to feel warm, too. In the aftermath of the monkey
experiment, it was hypothesized that our brains contain mirror neurons, nerve
cells that are dedicated to the task of imitating others. Most scientists no longer
feel that specific mirror neurons exist; instead, there is a brainwide mirroring
system whose tasks are shared by a number of regions and pathways. The
imitating effect—the reason your hands warm up when your friend rubs hers
together—happens because neural circuits throughout your brain are copying
what you hear and see. Nerves in your frontal and prefrontal cortex (the same
ones that are activated when you plan to rub your own hands together and then
execute that plan) begin to fire. At the same time, neurons in your