My busy brain
Hello my fellow beautiful voyagers,
I wanted to share some of my recent learnings from the world of emotional wellbeing — writing helps me process them. I’d love to hear yours, too. As you’ve doubtless guessed, my curiosity about these topics is endless.
I’m channeling the courage to be disliked. One of Freud’s early colleagues in the establishment of modern psychology was a man named Alfred Adler.
Amanda Stern details Adler’s thinkings in her fantastic newsletter, but these lines caught my attention: “In 1912, as it became clear their ideas were too divergent, Alfred Adler broke away from Freud. The internal world captivated Freud, almost to the exclusion of external elements…Adler, on the other hand, believed that everyone shared the need to belong, and that personal problems were, in fact, interpersonal. Instead of looking at a person in isolation to understand their behavior, Adler saw people through the lens of their family system, friendships, roles in society and culture. To understand a human being involved taking into account the internal and external worlds together.” Amanda goes into detail about why having the courage to be disliked is one of Adler’s biggest pieces of advice for us all.
I knew reading was helping me regulate my brain chemistry. The person who introduced me to Amanda is Panio Gianopoulos. This week, Panio also introduced me to this article from Lit Hub How Do the Books We Read Change Our Brains? and this insight: "When you read about someone hitting a home run, your brain unfolds a compressed representation of hitting a homer and then uses your sensorimotor cortex to simulate it…In one imaging study, participants read tactile metaphors, including expressions like “hot-headed,” “unbending attitude,” “weight matters,” and “coarse language.”
The simple act of reading these phrases was associated with activity in the sensory strip, suggesting that tactile concepts repurpose the same regions we use for physically feeling things." This is a good reminder that in addition to my other emotional regulation strategies, reading actually helps me flood my brain with a fresh set of chemical associations that last up to five days after the book ends (maybe longer).
The Surgeon General’s office released new framework for workplace mental health yesterday, and they did a great job with it (apart from including a hyphen in well-being, a deep pet peeve of mine lololol).
If this topic interests you at all (and I know some of you see this and feel it is a snoozefest, and I support you in that too), check out my Linkedin post about why this is important. Be sure to esp note the comments and please weigh in if you’re interested!
Finally, it’s nothing new, but this week I was reminded of how important it is to see people in person. I am now giving myself the goal of trying to either go into the office or meet up with people 2-3 times a week.
Reach out and get together with a friend or colleague soon! I promise you it is the right thing to do.
Love Meredith