CREATIVE EXPERIENCES CAN TRAIN YOUR BRAIN TO NAVIGATE CHANGE
Its a new year, and something as simple as having to nudge our brains to write 2019 when we date a document demonstrates the power of patterns. Our cognitive brain knows what year it is, but just below conscious awareness is the habit of writing 2018, developed through repetitive behavior over a period of time. The brilliance of our brain-that it will rapidly produce a pattern to save energy and allow the cognitive functions to absorb new information, solve problems, and deal with complexity-is also what adds a degree of stress to the change process.
Repetitive experience produces neural pathways that become choices, behaviors, roles, and actions which come together as what we consider to be identity. As a result, disruption of patterns can give rise to feelings of vulnerability and anxiety, even driving a retreat to the old familiar, even if the change is something we need or want. But there are some parallels between the change and the creative process that can be enormously helpful in training our brains to make transitions with greater ease and effectiveness.
Accept ambivalence as a natural stage of any change process. Whether the change is as fantastic and fun as a long-awaited trip or as fear-inducing as a difficult treatment for a serious illness, we can expect to have conflicting emotions about moving into its new and unknowable aspects. Properly designed creative experiences can train our brain to not only tolerate that tension, but engage with it. The more fun we can have while engaging with it, the better equipped we will be to deal with the tension between what is and what is emerging.
The improv warm-up game “Mind Meld” demonstrates this principle. Sitting or standing in pairs, players do a “free association” word game. Making eye contact, the players count down “3, 2, 1” and then say the first word that pops into their mind. Both words are said at the same time. Then the countdown again, and players say another word at the same time. This play continues until both players say the same word at the same time It may sound impossible but it works. It feels like a kind of magic when the minds arrive upon the same word at the same moment.
The only way to play this game is to jump in and try. There may be doubt and disbelief that the mind meld will actually happen but it is a no-to-low-risk activity with a feel-good sense of winning when it works. With repetitive tries, players learn to keep going until something clicks. That is the creative process happening in real time.
Creative experiences have structure and rules that safely guide interaction while allowing for experimentation and novelty. Our social-emotional brain is most available to absorbing new information in the context of a supportive, positive emotional connections. Creative experiences like improvisation and storytelling can be designed to provide safety so exploration of ideas and relationships can freely occur, and freedom for that exploration to go in unexpected directions.
“Many people think that improvisation is completely made up. Improvisation is seen by many as a cauldron of chaos that produces funny from thin air. Nothing could be further from the truth,” writes Dr. A. Lee Lewis, Assistant Professor Psychiatry at The Medical University of South Carolina as well as improviser and actor, in the article “How The Principles Of Improvisational Theater Can Set Your Educational Potential Free” published in Academic Psychiatry. “While most theatrical elements are made up, improvisation can only be accomplished by following a distinct set of rules, agreed upon by the players. The rules, however, are not there to constrain us but instead are in place to free us up inside the game to take risks. Knowing that all the players have agreed to the same rules allows us to develop trust and to provide the opportunity to show our trustworthiness.”
Within structured exercises the group can create something to which everyone contributes but not one really controls. That combination of safety and novelty strengthens psychological “muscles” for dealing with what is unpredictable and new about a change process.
Feel the ground beneath your feet and the wealth of who you are. Just as a writer, storyteller, musician or any other artist brings their lived experience and style to an entirely new creative piece of work, we can draw from our earned wisdom, and repertoire of roles and stories when navigating the unfamiliar. What we bring to any change process — and is a natural element to any improvisation or creative process — is all of our knowledge, history, expertise, gifts and strengfths.
The ground beneath our feet is where we stand, psychologically and spiritually. A change process will feel more manageable when it is rooted in awareness of what we value about ourselves and all that we have learned until this moment. Creative experiences can be designed to focus our attention on, and heighten our emotional connection to, the resources we bring with us as we face the challenges of shaping our lives for the better.
Jude Treder-Wolff, LCSW, CGP, CPAI is a consultant/trainer and writer/performer. www.lifestage.org
